After the War (Re-write)
by wjames260
Summary: I posted a long, unedited story on here a few months ago. It got more traffic than I expected, and I want to make it readable. So, anyway. Here is the re-written version. I'll be updating weekly or so. It explores the characters becoming adults, after the war, after the moon. I want them to feel grounded and realistic. Getting older is weird and uncomfortable but normal.
1. Chapter 1

"I think maybe the orange one looks good on you," she tells him, without blushing, "It's your favorite color, isn't it?"

"Well, you know, _yeah_ ," he says, wrapping the scarf around his throat, "But - Shikamaru said I have to be more, uh, _diplomatic_? More, presentable! More presentable, you know. Like a politician, he said."

"A politician? Th-"

"Yeah! I thought I'd try it out, tonight, you know? I sorta need to do a good job next week."

"You'll be great! You'll be great next week."

Rubbing the back of his head, Naruto laughs a small, string of a laugh. He feels Kurama bristling, annoyed, woken up by his uncertainty.

"I promise you'll be great," she says, grabbing his left arm, tightening her grip around the prosthesis; it's too smooth, hairless, without muscle, like rubber, so she smiles up at him, a winning smile, a nindo smile, his favorite smile, "Hanabi just wears her favorite things and smiles a lot, when she goes to those - parties."

"I'm a grown-up though, you know."

She purses her lips-

"Can I ask your dad for help?"

She blinks, she shakes her head - no. He grins at her, all teeth and whiskers, and she pushes her face into his scarf, letting him grin into her hair, long and dark and reflective like a river at night. He smells her shampoo, cherry and soap.

Kurama forces himself back to sleep. Naruto laughs.

"What?"

"It's nothing."

They stand like that, pressing into each-other. All the immortal sadnesses, the rat-maze of childhood, the leaden treason of orphanhood - these things re-emerge and are defeated against her presence, her body, her unspoken warmth.

Lifting her chin with his bandaged fingers, he closes the distance between their faces. A moment passes full of molasses, faraway music.

"You taste like red bean paste."

She blushes. He laughs. Closing her mouth, she follows him out the door, as if tied by string.

— — —

Beneath the hospital sheets, his body lies narrow and flat like a wooden board. Thinning legs, forearms, wrists; gnarled fingers, knuckles. His skeleton seems to press against his skin, as though trying to escape. His eyes are black, half-open.

He is a retired Chunin, a survivor of the Great War, which he referred to, up until two weeks ago when he last breathed on his own, as the 'most recent war'. Bitter fighting humor, until the end. That was his final act of pride.

Words always stung her, his doctor. She is a decorated war veteran too, a Jonin, renown as a medical genius, and one of the six still living humans that did not experience Infinite Tsukoyomi. How many friends did she make and lose in those two, three days?

The thought plays in her mind, so she folds it, making it smaller, until it becomes invisible. She is at work; she keeps working, testing his pulse, turning knobs on the machines keeping him alive, adjusting the white drapes so that they fall in a nicer, more pleasing way.

"Doctor?"

It's the new nurse, a Genin, not even drinking age. Sakura knows her voice, already. A small, dark-violet voice, a voice always asking questions, always bowing slightly at the start of conversations. Something like a pinprick hits Sakura's brain, a small jag of annoyance, then - a small jag of forgiveness.

"Yes, what is it," she asks, turning away from the drapes. The nurse stands there, dressed in white, carrying a clipboard. Everything is white. Sakura's long white coat. The nurses' cream-white smocks and scrubs, the white papers on the clipboard. The off-white hospital sheets, the white mattress, the white tiled floors, the translucent white drapes. Even the fluorescent bulbs cast a white-beige color, unmarred by normal scatter, just a solid spread of soundless textureless light.

"The director said we - that it might be time to unplug," she gets the words out, pushing them through closed teeth, squinted eyes. Sakura folds her arms, shifts weight to the other foot. The nurse flinches.

"I agree."

He lies there, breathing, wheezing, unsure of the world around him, unable to know what is being discussed about him. He is an absolute, crippled by unconsciousness. Hooked up to machines, monitors, screens, and tanks. All this humming, buzzing, electronic noise. All the beeping, and whirring, and murmuring, and bubbling. Packs of blood hang from poles, in clear plastic bags, snaking into his arms via needles. A breathing tube, with it's forked tongue, sits perpetually in his nose, with a mask over his mouth… When is it still life, when does it become life? He has no chance of seeing, speaking, having consciousness. His experience of the world, currently and for the rest of his days, is the same as those who are dead and those who are not yet born, not yet conceived, not yet thought of. He does not possess will, he does not possess fire.

Sakura presses her thumbs against her temples, squeezes.

"Do it, now. It's time. The coma's lasted too long, now, weeks, more… You'll need the extra bed, tonight. It's Saturday. You'll need the bed."

"Are, you sure?"

"It's the right thing to do, it's the - compassionate - thing to do," Sakura adds, injecting a bit of husk into her tone, a bit of maternal authority. She is only twenty, but she is asked questions of. Younger nurses come to her for help and guidance. Three Genin consider themselves her pupils. Chunin follow her orders. She is one of the famous Konoha Eleven, the little cabal of war heroes that closed ranks around the Sixth Hokage.

This is something Sakura, daily, must remind herself of. Her own fame, her own authority. Kunoichi are an increasingly powerful force, with three Kage in the most recent generations, whose presence in society still threatens and frightens the oldguard. She thinks of her friends who will marry and have children, relegated to the household, lauded for becoming full-time mothers, respected for giving up their careers, their aspirations, their talents. But - is that something Sakura wants, too? Is there anything wrong with becoming a mother, a wife? Or maybe this is not the place for that, in the hospital, at work, at the bed of a dying veteran.

"Okay," Sakura says, more to herself than the Genin, "Its time. You know how to do it, right?"

Nodding, the nurse grabs the man's forearm, unsealing the white bandages - then, she stops to pray. Sakura waits, arms folded, watching. The girl's eyes close shut, her hands cease trembling, her jaw tightens, and something settles into the room, something languid and muted and assured.

"Okay," the nurse says, opening her eyes, "Okay," she repeats, pulling the bandage off the rest of the way in a snap, revealing the residual glue framing the puncture wound, the reddish bruised hole. Grabbing hold of the syringe's base, the nurse presses then pulls, sliding the needle out in a slow, sure manner, with deliberate crescendo. The wound does not bleed, anymore. It is pale, pink, flushed, drained - and it smells like rotten leaves, burned rubber.

"The respirator, next," Sakura commands. Blinking several time, biting her lower lips, concentrating, the nurse kneels down by the oxygen tank, turns the dial, unplugs the tube - there is an exhaling sound, a hissing, like wind sucking through a pinhole. Then, a kind of armistice, an interpersonal peace treaty. The room is white and well-lit and noiseless.

Standing, folding her hands over her waist, she watches the man as his body strives to breathe with what little organic will remains. It looks pitiful.

Life clings, even to the dead. Maggots surround bodies; decay is the passing of life, substance, food. Even a body without respiration, without working lungs, heart, kidneys, or liver, will struggle in the unappealing ugly way we all always struggle: in the body way, in the way of sweat, rippling fat, ape-like clumsiness. Life _wants_ to happen, and when it cannot happen, when it finally submits, it scatters, giving itself to the next bodies.

Until then - the animal of death, it snarls and snaps and bites. Dying is never a beautiful thing. Always, it is a thing of shit and piss and blood, of vomit and taut skin and crumbling nails, of splintering bones and clumps of hair. The noble part of dying comes from the viewers, the audience of your death, and it comes from the way you lived, the choices you made, the people you saved. This man, here, in the bed, was a veteran of the most deadly war in Shinobi history. A survivor, embittered, genial, prone to sullen bouts of pride. Now, he shakes, gasps and gurgles from the throat; turning off.

"Oh - oh God," the nurse whispers, looking down at her hands, clutching her fingers, twisting her knuckles. Quick, like wind, Sakura steps over, lifting her girl's chin.

"This man lived well. He dies fighting like a Shinobi should. Don't you dare deny him his final dignity, don't disrespect him by looking away."

The nurse stands up straighter, watching. Sakura swoops down to the bedside, placing her forefingers on the man's upturned wrist… His pulse is as dry as a clock without a second hand. She can feel him dying, that's what the rhythm of his blood says. Somewhere, a phone rings, buzzing once, letting out a single chirp. A text message. Sakura bows her head, destroys herself, reaches inside her pocket, turns it off.

His eyes, black and encrusted, do not close. A week from now, after they bury him at the Graveyard of Heroes, the Genin nurse will not eat lunch at the hospital cafeteria. She will feel small amidst the thousands of white stone-heads; she will vow to never again bow her head in shame.

— — —

A door slams, down the hall, like a bark. "I miss my dog," he mutters, changing the channel. It's an informercial; two citizens with big white smiles, wearing floral gowns, beg the viewers to buy embroidered shuriken packs; they come with 'iron fence' and 'cherry blossom' patterns.

He sips; he smells the hops, the sour, the foam and the type of metal the decanter was made of. He changes the channel; he smells the sulphur snap inside the Tv set, the copper wires, the black plastic and glass.

It's a cartoon about martial arts; the main character is a little orphan kid learning all three basic types of Fire Country Taijutsu: Strong Fist, Gentle Fist, and Monk Fist; she learns these styles from outrageous senseis who conjure ridiculous tasks for her to complete, such as running around the city five thousand times on just your hands.

He sips; he blinks.

The lights in his apartment are dark; the bulbs burnt out two, three weeks ago; he smells their blackened filaments, their residue gas.

He changes the channel; he sips; he blinks. It's the news; he turns up the volume; the newscasters look handsome, beautiful in a rigid and sterile way, as if made of angles. There's a construction project in the Grass, they're adding a new wing to Hozuki Castle, to be named after the previous warden; it will house refugee criminals only.

He sips.

There's a merger between two companies, both involved in manufacturing trains and train-lines, the ceremony held in the sunny Rain City. One CEO has investing stock in the Fire Iron Mines while the other CEO was named to the Fire Capital Relocation board. The two of them, both old, balding and war-less, shake hands, smoke cigars, wave to crowds, and cut a ribbon in front of a train station; the new line will be called Konan's Line, in honor of their martyr angel.

He sips, blinks, grabs the remote, and smells the battery acid inside the black plastic, the rubber buttons, the copper and wire.

The news is 'breaking', they say; a protest has pushed past the gates of the Fire Daimyo's mansion, the crowd spills into the front courtyard, the gardens full of violets and statues, the massive front steps; protestors hold signs, blow horns, shout and scream and yell, pounding fists on the front door; it's unclear what they're angry about, but they're burning an effigy of the First Hokage; then, one of the mansion windows shatters, a rock was thrown - all hell breaks loose, smoke and firecrackers and riotous noise, shields, mace and bottles; then - in an instant - the crowd falls asleep in unison; one of the Twelve Ninja Guardian stands at the top of the stairs, hands drawn in the Tiger sign.

He sips.

The news turns off, goes to commercial; it's a plush toy kunai, it comes in pink, orange, and green, with plans to add new colors, a full rainbow of colors, within the year.

He sips, sips and changes the channel. A jazz band plays in a dark blue club somewhere in the Land of Waves; the lead musician wears dark black sunglasses, with a saxophone shaped like a brass tuna, and a voice like an animal, all feral and erotic instinct. The music fills his head, transforms him into someone he doesn't quite recognize.

He changes the channel, sips, then sips. It's a pastor, on a stage, somewhere in a town hall near the Nara Forest, preaching about the Will of Fire; bald head gleaming, sweating, running a napkin through the sweat, eyes bulging with fervor and heat, fingers thick like pork, and the voice is a garble, a megaphone; the preacher says - "Know thyself, love thy neighbor, hate thy enemy!" - all these 'thys', its always 'thy' this and 'thy' that; he coughs, scratches his chin, scent of his own saliva, his own stomach acid, and the preacher keeps talking, spitting, veins bulging, diaphragm bursting, and -

He changes the channel, sips. The newscaster makes a pun, she smiles at him through the television, her teeth are bright and straight; he lifts his chin in greeting, tips the bottle her way. He feels like himself, again.

Then, he sips, he sips, and touches the red tattoos on his face; it was a clan thing, something cultural; his mother cut them into his skin when he was four, five. A long time ago, now, and long before the war, or exactly ten or eleven or twelve years before the war. What is the difference between 'a long time ago' and 'this many years ago?' He doesn't know, but the thought plagues him, punctures him, steals him away. His apartment smells like beer, and spit, and dog hair, and asbestos, and lead paint, and the alley outside where the cats gather to rummage and pilfer and hold their little meetings, their Catkage Summits: he laughs, he laughs and stops laughing.

He sips; he changes the channel. Static. White and black static haze, the noise is soothing, the noise is good, so he sips, sips and sips.

— — —

She does not linger to watch them wheel the corpse down to the morgue. Instead, she turns her phone back on, and peers at herself in the black mirror, her hair parted down the middle, her sharp green eyes, the crease of overwork crossing her face. _I have a diametric face_ , she thinks, with a well-sized forehead and the little purple diamond, a symbol of power, a symbol of strength and resilience and control. _Yes_ , she remembers, _I am controlled, deliberate, permanent, and marketable_. This is something she tells herself.

In four letters, she swears; a passing resident doesn't glance over his back; she likes the way he doesn't look at her even though he's younger than her, weaker than her, and just a Genin. She's always found repudiation, coupled with confidence bordering on dysfunction, slightly pornographic. There's something lovely about disrespect - in the right context. This is not the right context, the hospital, but he is already down the hall, around the corner, and to chase him down, now, and call him out for not acknowledging her presence, no salute, no nod of the head - she is the highest-ranked doctor in this military hospital, after all - to do that, now, would simply result in gossip, in secret slander, and the slow betrayal of every young woman here… the older ones would understand, maybe? She is unsure. She is sure. Yes, they would understand; Tsunade and Shizune would understand, but they would tell her something like 'earn respect with your skills' which, she feels, she has already done. Hasn't she? At thirteen, she brought a fish back to life, was taken in by the world's greatest doctor. At fourteen, she was promoted, expected to lead medical teams, regularly saved lives, limbs, on missions. At fifteen, she cured an incurable poison and was lauded by Suna's most respected healer. At sixteen, she saved the life of Hyuuga Hinata, along with several others, during Konoha's worst disaster. At seventeen, she helped lead the Medical Regiment in the Great War, she saved countless lives doing meatball surgery while selfish little soldiers confessed their love to her. At nineteen, she healed both the body and heart of the world's strongest shinobi, helping - again - to save the world. And, now, she is in the process of founding her own hospital, a children's mental health ward. You'd think, somewhere between all the lobbying on behalf of compassion, the saving of lives every single day of her life, and the locking down her own heart in order to continue saving lives and lobbying - you'd think, somewhere in all that, she'd gain a little respect from these young, somewhat handsome Genin men wearing scrubs a size too small, strutting up and down the hospital hallways, as if becoming a doctor is a thing of celebrity rather than compassion, as if becoming a doctor is a thing of money rather than honor.

Oh well, she mutters, hugging her knees in tight, checking her phone. It hums in her palm, the screen stings her eyes. A text from Ino: Everyones meting at Sheeps!

Another text from Ino: *meeting LOL

Another text from Ino: Cum to Sheeps!1!?

Another text from Ino: srsly !

Another text from Ino: Sheeeeaeep's!

Five more texts, she doesn't read them. Ino, Ino, unknown, Naruto, and Ino.

Slipping her phone into her pocket, Sakura folds her arms, rests her head against the wall, and closes her eyes. Eyelid darkness always, somehow, turns pink; it only takes two-and-a-half minutes. As the memories swell, she -

Her pager goes off. Someone is dying. She runs down the hall because down the hall someone is dying.

— — —

The fridge is empty, except for cardboard and aroma. That damp smell, and whiff of onion rind, livered carrots, and chinese takeout. Even though the fridge is empty, the odors remain. Nothing is hidden from him. He smells every single thing he has put in this fridge since he moved in after the war, and he smells most of the things his predecessor put in the fridge, too. Milk, although he hasn't bought milk in months. Pizza and frost, pepperoni, cheddar, tomato sauce, bread, and all the litany of preservatives. Rotten kale, which he never bought, and sour cream, which he has never bought, and sweet rolls, which he buys most night at the corner-store. He also smells the lightbulb, the filament, the glass, the gas, the copper. He smells the freezer, with it's ice and coils and the blue pack thing. And, he smells the plastic of everything, the types of plastic, the concoctions of plastic. Nothing is hidden from him. The fridge is empty, except for cardboard - and he smells the cardboard, slightly damp - an empty cardboard case; it's emptiness inside of emptiness. Emptiness doesn't smell like anything, though; emptiness is odorless and facile.

Closing the door, he lingers on the kitchen tiles, hands stuffed in his pockets. His faces itches, where the hair grows, his chin and cheeks and neck. The bad thoughts start to creep in, he smells the mortar-fire, the blood-soaked trees, and the iconic formaldehyde of the Zetsu.

In one swing of motion, he grabs his phone, his keys, puts on his coat - and all those scents, too, come at him, the threading, the sour beer stains, the metal of the keys, the plastic in the phone, the dog-hair - and he opens the door, closes it, locks it, and leaves down the hall.

He smells all the neighbors, their sex, their dinners, their work odors.

From his pocket, he pulls a plastic tube, uncaps it, holds it up to his nose - ginger - and snorts. All the odors in the world disappear at once, leaving him in breathable isolation. Finally, everything is hidden from him. His back straightens, his chin rises, something like mischief creeps into his grin, his fangs, his devil eyes.

He walks down the hall, down the stairs, out the door of the building, into the streets, where nothing smells like anything anymore, and he follows the map in his head, the memorized motions, all the way there.

Back at home, the television is still on, murmuring, flickering, illuminating the couch and all the cap-less empty bottles cluttering his coffee table.

— — —

"Just texted her. I think she's at work, though."

…

"Hinata," he says, and she turns to look at him. She'd been staring at a fence-post where, last week, she saw, somebody had sprayed their name in graffiti, all bulb-ish and blue font, like cotton candy, but then, today, or yesterday, somebody else, probably a city employee, had painted over it in a slightly off-color paint than the fence itself, leaving just a gray square.

"Naruto," she says, and a smile slips onto his face. Her face is pale and beautiful. Her people came from the moon, "I-"

"Hey, Hey, I was just thinking, we should - uh, would you want to head towards the Utatane District, tonight, right now?"

"- what's happening over there?-"

"Some of the guys are meeting up at a bar… Sheep's! You remember Sheep's? Kiba'll be there. Ino, too. And - uh, maybe Sakura, some of the others, you know."

She blinks, looks off in the direction, northeast. The Utatane District lies where the Chunin Exams stadium used to be, before it was destroyed.

"I mean-" he starts, and she looks at him, her eyes are big and pale and all-knowing, he talks faster, "I know your limit is sort of low, you know, but you don't have to drink, obviously, you know," and he laughs.

"It's fine, I like drinking, too, just not as much as Kib-"

"Right. Yeah. Right!"

"Are you okay, Naruto?"

"Hmm? I'm fine. Im fine! Sorry. I'm fine, though. I'm just worried about next week. I shouldn't be worried though, 'cause I'll do great."

She folds her hands in front of her, standing, waiting by the fence-post. She looks almost porcelain, under the moonlight. Deep and low, Kurama growls, mutters something ancient, obscene. Was it a joke? Kurama doesn't make jokes. He only judges, seduces, and gives advice.

Naruto clears his throat, its been like that ever since he swallowed that crow, "I think Sakura will be there, eventually. I know Ino will."

"I'll go, c'mon, lets go see our friends," she says, taking his real arm. As they walk, the street-lamps flicker.


	2. Chapter 2

Ino's laughter is made of white feathers; swan-like and free, it blooms above the surface of bar-noise, fluttering through the slowly turning ceiling fans, the sour amber lamps, the dust-beam rafters. She always laughs upwards, throwing her head back like dancing, and then the laughter pours from her mouth like water from a statue in the center of a fountain.

When she finishes laughing, as the man who hit on her slinks away, back to the dark corners of the crowded bar, Ino raises her cocktail - a bright blue drink, full of ice and light, with a tiny green parasol - and slugs it, smiling and sweating and untroubled as her thoughts scatter and fog, her inhibitions fade, and her cheeks flush pink and red.

"We girls," she begins, wiping her mouth with her knuckles - Hinata and Tenten settle in their bar-stools, waiting, smiling within waiting - Ino passes a glance across the crowd, to the front door of the bar, her eyes slightly cross, then looks up, almost surprised she stopped talking, "We girls always need to have a drink in our hands. You know, for protection! It's good to hold a drink, _Hinata_ , its good 'cause then they all know you're taken, already, or not looking. A girl without a drink, they think she's, I don't know, they think she's sitting there with spread legs, you know?"

Hinata unfolds her hands, resting them on the bar-top like pale leaves. Tenten, sitting on the other side of her, crackles with laughter.

"Holy crap, Ino," she exclaims, her hair-bun frizzing in the damp heat of the bar, "I didn't know you got like this, when you drink. Sakura's gonna scold you, later, if you keep this up."

"I get like many things, my ward, my fine ward," Ino declares, pointing a finger at her, like an accusation, "And Sakura can _scold_ me however she likes! A girl's out for herself in this world of bars and pubs and all that, all those things. A girl has to know the ins and outs, she has to be smarter than the men. Hinata, however, here, little Hinata, _pobre_ Hinata-"

"Well," Tenten says, cocking her head, thinking of a thousand rebuttals, choosing just one, "You can usually trust the bartenders, though. They look out for the girls."

"They just want the business! And they don't want bad reviews or rumors. We're like walking advertisements - like, like girls, hot girls, we're like those stupid signs people get paid to, to do tricks with, and stuff, in front of stores!"

"Yes, well - yes. But still."

"I've heard of the ones, over at Cherry Pit-"

"Is that new? On the corner of Toka and Eleventh? Where, uh, where the surplus ninja tool sto-"

"No! It's not new! It's been around for _ever_ and ever and ever. It _is_ on Eleventh, though. Down further, near - uh - near that Kusa-style restaurant that sells all those, like, grass-roll things, like _onigiri_ but tied with blades of sweetgrass? That place is new, though, that place is new. But not Cherry Pit. Cherry Pit has never been new."

"It was there since before the war, I think," Hinata says, or asks, or mutters, trying to involve herself in the conversation. All the new streets and shops and neighborhoods confuse her; Konoha has become like a maze. When they re-built everything, after the disaster, they initially tried to re-create as similarly as possible. But, after a grant from the Daimyo, following the war, a new architect was brought in, someone famous, a husband of a niece of someone more famous. Thus, the Utatane District was born, and the Uzumaki Corridor became a slum, and the Aburame Forest was scheduled for demolition, among many other changes. The village of her childhood is no longer a village, and Konoha is no longer her childhood.

"Yeah, yeah! Cherry Pit is one of the old places, from before everything happened," Ino says, setting her drink down on the bar-top, "I heard, um, the Wood Style guy, who requested punishment, after the war, for being captured and used by Akatsuki? He was the one who personally rebuilt Cherry Pit 'cause it was, like, one of the Anbu safe-houses, or something. They'd hold secret meetings in the basement, or something. Anyway - I heard the bartenders there over-saturate the girls' drinks."

"That's terrible," Hinata says, folding and unfolding her hands in her lap.

"Costs less to get drunk," Tenten says, smirking, sipping her beer. It's reddish and brown, with a thick layer of beige foam that tastes like pomegranates.

Ino laughs her laugh, again, like a spray of sweet-water. Someone down the bar looks over, craning his neck to see above the heads, dilated eyes running up and down the shape of her purple skirt commiserating with the bar-stool. It's almost like Kamui, the way he tries to hoard her beauty with his dark black pupils. Ino doesn't have to turn around to notice, she just smirks, sips her drink, and keeps talking.

"It's all part of their _scheme_ ," she says, nodding like a sage. Hinata blinks, trying to hide her confusion. Ino twists her lips, cocks her head, and adjusts her gaze into something resembling pity.

"The _men_ , Hinata," she says, patting her shoulder, pulling at the hem of her shirt, "Its all part of their scheme to get us drunk and _fuck_ us."

Hinata closes her mouth, sits up a little straighter, more rigid and stilted, wringing her hands in her lap. The bar is noisy, and poorly lit, and crowded, and full of negative space, dark matter, people and hands and loud grinning faces. Everything smells like liquor and sweat. Music plays from somewhere in the ceiling, the walls - it's samba but nobody dances. They're all standing in crowds of themselves, drinking, sipping, faces beaming with sweat, like masks of sweat, chatting, interrupting each-other, touching each-other, flirting and seducing and lying, grabbing each-other's shoulders, shirts, skirts, thighs, chins, and hair. All of this cast in sour amber light, from the lamps in the ceiling, and back-lit by the front wall full of windows looking out onto the street, the pub street, a place of lights and cigarettes and crowds of moving people. Why do they go inside, into confined busy rooms, and drink and drink and get less and less cognitive, when they could be outside, in the free and unguarded air, able to flee and jump and climb? Aren't they shinobi, soldiers, athletes? Hinata doesn't know; she closes her eyes; she opens them; everything is still the same.

"You don't come to bars much, do you," Tenten says, touching Hinata's shoulder-blade, through her shirts, one long-sleeved baggy white shirt underneath one short-sleeved baggy dark-blue shirt. Her neck is sweating, her hair is untied, hanging low towards the small of her back.

"Not really," Hinata admits, something like relief spreading through her, as if she drank cold water, "I - it's okay, though."

"You're having fun?"

"Yep."

Shaking her head, Ino sets down her drink, and then peers into Hinata's hands on the bar-top.

"Ino?"

She keeps staring, her face inches from Hinata's folded hands, without saying anything, without changing her slightly bemused expression.

"Ino," Tenten says, setting down her beer.

"There's something missing here," Ino says, meandering like a cat, "Something. Something. But I can't place my finger on it," she claims, hovering her forefinger over Hinata's folded, rigid hands. Then, she jabs into the crevice of her knuckles.

Laughing, Tenten picks up her beer, sips, then sets it back down. Hinata curls her lips inwards, blushing, unsure if she is supposed to remove her hands from the bar, if perhaps she is committing a social feax-paux.

"Well, It's whatever," Tenten says, smiling at the back of Hinata's head, "Probably a smart move, not to get too drunk."

"She won't get _any_ drunk, like that."

"You were _just now_ complaining about bartenders over-saturating girls' drinks!"

"Next time a guy comes over here, to buy us drinks or whatever, Im getting Hinata one."

"Thats-"

"Hey, ladies! Did someone say next time a guy comes?'"

He's a tall, fit man wearing a purple button-up with rolled up sleeves. His face possesses both a doe-ish-ness and something sincerely insincere.

Ino laughs upwards, into the sky beyond the ceiling.

— — —

He shoots - it rolls, it clacks, it careens - and the four-ball falls into the wrong pocket. Kiba laughs; Naruto groans; Kiba slaps his back; Naruto takes the beers; Kiba takes the cue stick and begins prowling the circumference of the table, sniffing like a bloodhound.

"Does that help?"

"Don't question my methods, Genin."

This is a game of strategy and physics, posture and precision and formula; luck and willpower are useless here. Wondering if he'd still be unable to answer any of the questions on the written portion of the Chunin Exams, Naruto takes a sip: fizz and tangerines and pulp.

"What kind of beer is this?"

"Which one?"

"Mine."

"You don't know? Its yours, buddy."

"You got it for me."

"Its called Hokage Sunshine, or something."

Naruto grimaces, sips again; the sugar coats his gums, teeth, and tongue like an adhesive. Setting them down the rim of the table, he watches Kiba shoot, miss, and click his tongue.

"Don't set it there, throws off my game."

"What? How?"

"I'll knock it off the side, or something. Just, keep 'em in your hands. I'll hold 'em when it's your turn, too."

Shrugging, Naruto takes the cue back; Kiba picks up the beers and takes a sip of his own; Naruto chalks the cue.

"What's yours called?"

"Black Earth. Tastes like it, too."

Roaming the side of the table, Naruto casts little glances across the bar instead of searching for a shot. Its a noisy, crowded place, damp and hot like a toad's belly. There's just one pool table near the patio entrance unused in the winter, a little pocket of quiet in the corner of the bar. Yet, nobody else dares ask for next game. The table is theirs all night.

"You gonna shoot?"

"Yeah, yeah," Naruto says, centering himself, picking out a random measurement. He bends low, below the hanging lamp, under the warm orange light like an incubator. The table is almost competition sized, with just a few tears in the green velvet, riddled with blue chalk streaks.

Kiba keeps sipping, first from one then from the other. Sugar pop orange followed by wood chips and sediment. His tongue shivers, crinkles. Across the room, he catches a glimpse of Hinata being handed a drink, a cocktail with lime, from the bartender. She's there, inside of all the noise and people, at the edge of the crowd, pushed up against the bar-top. When they make brief eye contact, he sees something sad in her face, something strained and stilted and a little scared. Then, the crowd shifts; she's gone inside the hull.

"You can't just tell her what to do like that, dude."

"Huh?"

Glugging the beer, Kiba squeezes his eyes shut. It tastes like dirt and rocks and tree bark, liquified and blended, forced down his throat. Then, it tastes like gunpowder and ash, like hot boiling blood and the sterile foamy war rations, like crushed and snorted food pills, and like the hospital's oral anesthetic.

When the beer is halfway through, he burps, belches, like a megaphone full of gravel.

"Listen, Naruto," Kiba says, slobbering, wiping the slobber with his glass, something new and shining in his dog eyes, something reddish and narrow and fox-like, "Lemme tell you something about the _women_ \- and I know, cause I grew up in a house full of _bitches_! Get it? Eh?"

Naruto laughs a small queasy laugh. He picks up the chalk, sets it back down, glances into the crowd of the bar, scanning. She's hidden in there, somewhere, at the bar, behind the bodies of all these people. She must be nervous in this crowded, noisy place.

"Naruto," Kiba exclaims, snapping his fingers, "Women, they don't wanna be _told_. Kay? They don't wanna be - Listen, Naruto. They're more - smarter than us… Seriously! Their brains form earlier than ours! Yours - we're like, what, twenty, twenty-one? Our brains still have like three or fours years left to finish forming. Theirs? Already done, basically. They mature way earlier than guys! Remember how in the Academy the girls were always taller than us? That's why! Naruto, that's why! They're adults longer than we're adults, and sometimes we just gotta lay down our pride and let them take us by the hand. They know it, dude. They know the long game, the enduring game. Kay? I mean, shit, that's why the Fifth was so fucking good with diplomacy! Cause she a woman! The Third had like twenty wars and all those dead kids, but the Fifth came in and we made peace like right away with our enemies! Right? And! And it was a _woman_ who ended the Bloody Mist! Think about that, a second. The women, they are the better leaders, I swear. When you become Hokage, if I don't get there first, mind you, you'll have to be _Naruko_ the whole time if you wanna do anything good!"

"Okay, Kiba," he says, setting up to shoot, taking aim, knowing Kiba will shut up for a second out of respect for the game - so, Naruto sets, he pulls back, he shoots, and the cue-ball careens across the velvet, smacking into the side, and spinning to a stop somewhere in no-man's land.

"Too- too much chakra," Naruto mutters, handing the stick back to Kiba, taking the beers. He sips his own, purses his lips, and tries Kiba's, and purses his lips, again.

"These are both crap," he announces, holding the glasses up towards the hanging lamp. The beers glow in the warm orange light, like lanterns.

"Seriously, though, you fucking bastard. You damn bastard," Kiba growls, almost spitting, his eyes bright and wild, "You got the most beautiful girl in Konoha, at your hips, Naruto! You bastard. You tool. You got the most beautiful girl in Konoha, and you don't even ask her how her day is?"

"What are you - of course I do!"

"Nah, nah, Naruto. I known the both of your for years, now. Since kids. And I know how loud, and obnoxious, and decisive you are. You're not asking her stuff. You're just making plans, spontaneous Naruto plans and expecting her to keep up," he says, rubbing the chalk on the cue, wandering to the other side of the table, his devil dog eyes flitting about the velvet, searching for a shot, "Listen Naruto, Hinata's had a shit time of it, her whole life - why do you think she wears baggy clothes all the time? She grew too quick, Naruto. She grew up fast, her body I mean, and the - the fucking rich ass noblemen noticed. I guarantee you that, they noticed. They noticed and got _hard_. Do you even know how a tea ceremony works, Naruto?"

Shaking his head, his gut turns, squirms, something shadowy and tired unfolding in his stomach. Kurama is asleep, snoring. Maybe it's the beer.

"Yeah, I don't know anything about tea ceremonies, Kiba."

"Me neither," he says, eyeing the beers in Naruto's hands. "You and I, _street_ guys like us. Or whatever. _Poor!_ We're not cut out for tea ceremonies."

Then, he shoots without measuring. The balls clack off one-another like a machine, like some sort of mechanism, as if cords and wires connect them all; two fall in - both Kiba's.

Grimacing, Naruto lifts his beer to his lips, then lowers it away.

"Nice shot," he says, and Kiba grins a feral, angry grin. Handing the cue back to Naruto, he takes the beers, sipping from his before the exchange is even finished.

"Kiba, your beer really sucks," Naruto says, chalking the cue.

"It's like tree bark, I practically have to chew it. You cant move a muscle in them, though."

"What?"

"Tea ceremonies. You can't move a frickin' _muscle_."

"Like Sage training," Naruto says, taking a step back from the table. He's got almost twice as many balls left. That thing in him, the thing that refuses to lose or give up, that obsessive and egotistical and orphaned thing, it wakes, it flares, his whiskers sharpen, his chakra bristles.

" _And,_ if you don't drop the tea-cup, the forty year old fat dude across from you-"

"What?"

"- You're twelve, right, now, and a girl - he's gonna _marry_ you."

"Is that - is that what happens in tea ceremonies?"

"Hell yeah. Hell yeah, Naruto, that's what happens. She told me, a long time ago, after her last one."

Closing his eyes, opening them, Naruto sets up his next shot, he pulls back the cue, but Kiba keeps talking.

"And if you _don't_ drop the cup, Naruto. If you _don't_. That fat old rich virgin across the room - he's gonna break your hymen, and you're gonna bleed all the fuck over his satin linen sheets or whatever, and then that's your _life_."

Naruto shoots, missing the cue ball entirely, the sheer chakra shakes the table.

"Biiiffffff!" Kiba yells out, laughing an angry laugh. Glaring inwardly, Naruto wipes chalk dust from his sleeve, and Kiba waves the glasses, beer slopping down the sides, "Try again!"

So, he does. Naruto re-sets and Kiba keeps talking.

"Dowries, Naruto. Politics. That shit. If you don't drop the cup, that's your life. If you _do_ drop the cup, the worst that happens, probably - is your daddy hates you, maybe beats you a little, you know, smacks you around, making sure to leave obvious bruises but not on your pretty little face, and he punishes you with chores and shit, and berates, belittles, and be-uh-insults you, and then gives up on you entirely, throws you away like yesterday's trash, turns you into a kid soldier just 'cause you - well. Just 'cause you didn't wanta get _fucked_ yet."

"Sounds tough," Naruto says, harnessing nature energy, centering his chakras, in an attempt to zone out all the noise. He's always been competitive, but right now there are two competitions happening at once. He could make a Shadow Clone, but -

"Yeah! Naruto, yeah, you're getting it. Listen, she doesn't - how do I say this right… She wants to be - she wants _you_ to be the _man_ , Naruto, right? She wants you to say what's what, to have a steady firm back, you know, to be able to protect and do all that _man_ shit."

"Thats not what you were saying before," Naruto says, pulling back the cue like a sling-shot.

"I'm saying new stuff now - keep up. Anyway! She wants you to be the fucking man, but she's lived a life void of freedom. She doesn't know what it''s like to go your own way, really. She never went on a journey, like you did, outta the village. She wants that _freedom_ , Naruto, she wants that, too, deeper down, and she's gonna find it, one day, and if you don't keep up, she's gonna leave you."

"Shut up, Kiba," Naruto says, and the nature energy he gathered fractures, dissipates; then, he shoots, knocking one of his balls in. Kiba yowls, performing something like a song of defeat. Scowling, Naruto stands back upright, scratching his head. Kiba takes the cue back, hands over the beers.

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger, Naruto," Kiba says, grinning like a fox. Naruto doesn't bother sharing eye contact with him; instead, he peers at the crowded bar. When his sage chakra was gathered, he felt her presence, a dot of warmth amidst a sea of chakras. Now, he cannot sense her.

"The only time she knew _any_ kind of freedom was on Team Eight," Kiba announces, chalking the cue, "That's it. Kurenai-sensei was the first woman in her life to teach her _anything_ that wasn't about, like, how to tie kimonos and shit. That's important for women, yah know? To have _women_ mentors, that shit's _important_! Why do you think Sakura gravitated to the Fifth, and Ino learned all that shit from Shizune, and - it's why Tenten's so damn weird, actually, I bet… Anyway, I'm telling you, Naruto, Hinata's gonna go on a little adventure sometime, a little tryst somewhere, without you, you're gonna be busy doing Hokage shit, and she's gonna go off somewhere on her own, somewhere new, and she's gonna realize, fucking finally, that her name don' t need to mean shit, and then she's gonna grow - she's gonna grow fast and hard and fast, and you're gonna have to keep up. I'll tell you that right now, Naruto. That's what gonna happen… prepare yourself. You're- your'e a good guy"

"Thanks," Naruto says, lying, staring into their beers. Part of him wants to drink both as fast as possible; part of him wants to set them on the pool table and walk away.

Kiba watches, blinks, then tucks his head low, scouring the table for a shot. It's quiet, a moment. Peaceable and diplomatic. An armistice. The end of war while he measures and prepares and takes his posture. Then, he talks, again, like a clogged faucet breaking open.

"You are, though! You are a good guy! You're a fucking asshat, obviously, but you're a good guy, you know, you save the world and shit. She loves you, Naruto. She fucking _loves_ you. But you don't even see it, man. Toneri, he kinda fucked her up a little bit."

"Kiba."

"He - well, he tore up her red scarf. He - she told me how he drugged her, with chakra-"

"Stop it."

"-And put her in a portrait above his fire-place-"

"Kiba."

"And how he drank tea while watching her hang there. It was fire-lilly tea, Naruto. It only grows along the banks of Lake Senju, you know, where the Hyuuga go vacation, every summer. _Only_ there, the fire-lily grows. Just - just outside the village. First lake you see, on the way to the capitol. That's the kind of tea he drank while he sat there, watching her, talking to her, sometimes not saying anything at all, sometimes - And, he just sat there and sipped, stirred, stared at her, at her body, her eyes, her hair and everything. And she couldn't move, Naruto. She couldn't move. She could only lie there and take it -"

"Kiba, stop it, stop talking about it."

"- Stop? She couldn't _move_ , Naruto. Don't you get what I'm saying? She couldn't move. She could only lie there and - she thought about you, that's what she told me, that's how she got through it. She thought about you the whole time."

"Stop."

"You notice it, right? How she, like, stiffens up, at night, now? When the moon is out? How she can't look at it? People always told her - _guys_ , I guess, really - they always told her that her eyes look like moons. They thought it was a compliment - and it was, really. She liked it when they said those things, but it scared her, too. Now, though, it's different. Her eyes _do_ look like moons. They - they're _his_ , now."

Kiba shoots, misses.

Naruto takes a sip.

"You don't know anything, Kiba."

" _You_ don't know _shit_ about _women_ , Naruto, or relationships - or pain, too. You don't know shit about women or pain or women's pain. Normal people don't get to, like, meet the ghost of their dad twice, to help them get over shit. Normal people don't get to travel around the world with a sage or whatever. And normal people definitely don't get to commune with the Sage of the Six Paths, and aren't fucking _re-incarnations_ of his son, and can't just debate their enemies into submission. Normal people don't have the power, like you do, like you have - normal people get hurt and they stay hurt and they don't get better but they keep living anyway, you know, instead of getting to meditate under magical waterfalls on Lion Turtle Island or up on a mountain where hyper-intelligent sage toad oracles know how to balance your yin and yang shit or whatever."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying you have a lot to learn about normal people. If you wanna be Hokage, you gotta learn some things. And if you want Hinata, you gotta learn some things."

Naruto stares at the green velvet, the remaining gleaming balls, the warm orange lamp-light. Konoha feels, suddenly and maybe permanently, like a toy town. The old hatreds, from his childhood, start to re-emerge. The wondering, the doubt. When he painted 'COCK' on the Fourth's face - he felt so powerful, so vindicated, in a beautifully selfish way he hasn't felt since. He misses it.

Inside the darknesses of his body, he hears Kurama laughing.

"And, women, too!"

"Kiba, c'mon. You're drunk."

"You just know about those fan-girls of yours, who used to hang all over you, man. You gotta learn some shit, and _fast_ , 'cause I've seen you in action, and your tutors have all been lonely perverts, and you just - you're an obsessive little ass, Naruto, and you always always take the lead on everything you ever do, and your way too damn insecure, deep down, and I swear, Naruto, if you don't take a step aside, for one damn second, just to let her fucking speak out loud, if you don't stop interrupting her for once, she's gonna leave the shit out of you, and you're not gonna understand it, 'cause you think, just 'cause she loved you first, that she'll never ever ever have second-thoughts, but guess what buddy, this is real, this is real life, and people grow and change in different ways. I see it happening, already, man. She's getting smarter, more mature, and even a little confident. It's good! That's all good shit. It's just, as a friend, man, you gotta keep up."

"How would you - you've been drunk for two years, Kiba."

"Fuck you."

"You have."

"Fuck you."

"Kiba…"

"You know what man….. I forgive you, for saying that. I do. I forgive your unsympathetic assface. I'm just telling you, man - she does everything she does for _you_ , she smiles _your_ favorite fucking smiles - 'cause she's perceptive as fuck, she _notices_ that shit - and she washes _your_ shit, and makes _you_ feel better about all _your_ damn baggage, and she _only_ does shit _you_ wanna do - 'cause she doesn't know any other way. It doesn't make her happy, being like that - it makes her _sad_. It - she thinks it makes her happy, she does, but it doesn't, she's a tragedy, Naruto, she's a tragedy of a person. Her dad never liked her, ever. He never said anything good about her. He tried to sell her off so many damn times to gross old men, nobles and royalty and shit, eyes wide shut kinda people, but she was never good enough for all those freaks. So, she became this way, this - and it was like this when we were kids, too, on Team 8 - she always just does whatever she thinks the men in her life will like. She treats every single interaction, with a man, like she's nine years old again, in a fucking kimono, deciding if she should drop the damn tea-cup. I'm saying it out loud, man, it's the truth - she was like that with me and Shino, too, for a long time. She'll do everything she can to make you happy, Naruto, but what are you doing for her? You gotta figure that out before its too late."

Naruto just stands there, staring into the pool table, all the green velvet, the blue chalk streaks, the sad assortment of colored balls. He mumbles a thanks. It kills him to do it, to set down his pride like a heavy cement block, to let the anchor of himself dangle and break and fall. Kurama is quiet, again, sleeping or pretending to sleep.

"Sure thing, buddy," Kiba says, slapping his back, leaning the pool cue against the table and grabbing the beers out of his hands.

— — —

A moment passes.

Ino sips her new drink, its tart and docile and basic - a gin and tonic with a cut of lime, mostly ice. Watching the show, she plucks the lime off the rim, squeezes it into the drink, and then sucks the sticky sour juice from her fingers. Tenten just relaxes, just watching, knowing full well she'll have to intervene.

Another moment passes.

The noise of the bar rises, like static. The song on the loudspeaker changes to something new, full of pop and force, with a woman singing like a man.

"You like it," the man dressed in purple asks or tells her. Hinata picks the glass back up, a little whiskey spills down the side, seeping into the scar on her forefinger from all the knitting she's been doing. It stings painlessly, pleasantly. A new scarf, she wants to make. This time, for her sister.

She knows she's supposed to answer this strange man. His question, 'do you like it,' means much more than the drink. He's asking about himself, his body, his scent, his hair and presence, and sex. Does she _like_ it, does she _want_ it, does she want _him_. This is not something she is used to. Her whole life, including right now, she's worn baggy clothing and tried her best not to be unnoticed. In many ways, this made her a good ninja, full of stealth and subversion. But, here, in the bar, you cannot be a good ninja if you are a woman. If you are a woman, you are always noticed, no matter how much clothing you wear, no matter how much you try to hide.

"Well?"

The purple man presses close, his arm slithering across the tiny back of her bar-stool, as though trying to push Tenten out of the picture frame. Hinata becomes smaller, within herself. He smells like lilacs, she notices, with something dark and hairy. She hears the thrum of his heart-beat, the scotch on his breath, damp and lustful, as the well-dressed animal of his body wraps around the tiny wooden back of her stool.

Ino and Tenten just watch, almost sadistically, almost enjoying this. Inaction, usually, is the wrong choice. But, sometimes, a girl needs to show some self-determination or proof that she is empowered, as if not being empowered is a sin of some kind, a weakness, a fragility. Hinata does not feel weak, nor fragile, nor sinful. Yet, she feels leered at, by both the men and the women, the 'woke' women and the activists and the un-woke and the horny boys.

"What," the purple man says, like snapping his fingers in her face, "Are you speechless? Do I make you speechless?"

Hinata looks up at him. He is beautiful, handsome, sculpted. Preened and manicured and hair-gelled, likely one of the most photogenic men she has ever met. Well-like eyes, glistening like shadow mirrors. Razor jaw-line, with just a shade of facial hair, purposefully unkept in an intelligent-seeming way. He seems like a professor who drinks only the blackest coffees. Or, maybe he is a playboy socialite. Or, a professional actor-model. A rude gentleman, a seductive and polite hedonist. To seduce is to slither and hiss, his face tells her. To sleep with him is to arch your back and shows your ribcage, his face tells her. To wake up in the morning, under the softest sheets, is to find his note and taxi fare, his face tells her.

"What, you have a guy, already?"

She looks over to where the boys are - Naruto and Kiba - playing pool under a warm orange light, on the other side of the bar. Kiba is explaining something about pool, waving his arms in a wild, almost angry way, as though swatting flies. Naruto is pretending to listen, confused and distant and bored, a mannequin of himself. Hinata laughs inside the dark of her thoughts.

"Oh," the purple man says, seeing who she's seeing, "Oh, _shit._ "

" _Yeah_ ," Ino says, shining with glee, enraptured by the turning events, clutching her gin but not drinking it.

"So, which one is your boyfriend," he asks, something new in his voice and face, something sincere. She sees the coward in him, the survivor part of him, the part that flees and dodges and ducks. She hears, in his voice, proof of how he sees people and women - like a set of numbers and formulas, like something to win in a poker game. Smiling a tiny and disgusted smile, she nods in the smallest way. His pupils close, as though suddenly biologically uninterested in her.

He swears. Tenten snickers, sips her beer. Ino laughs upwards.

"So you're _that_ Hyuuga twin. _Shit_ ," he says, in a tone like he got a parking ticket that he's rich enough to pay, dyed with irony and a kind of hustler's pride. Tenten finishes her beer, wipes the foam on the back of her hand.

"They're not twins," she says, something tipping in her voice, "And the other one's like fourteen, or something."

He ignores her. He doesn't have time for beer-drinking women. Turning away, to Ino, he slides his eyes up and down her body, like a farewell wave, then says, "And _you're_ a damn _sociopath_."

Ino laughs, cackling with glee, her conspiracy exposed; her laugh is a monument to the happiness of being caught.

Hinata exhales. Taking a sip of her new drink, she grimaces; it's spicy and hot - it's a whiskey mix called Will of Fire. Blasphemous and exciting and erotic. She sets the drink back on the bar-top and drops her hands into her lap like a wreath.

"That was mean, Ino," Tenten says, watching the purple man melt into the crowd, disappearing like black liquid into the static hull of drunken bodies.

"It's not mean! Did you see how slimy he was?"

"Yeah, well - yes."

"Its not mean if the guy is gross. I mean, shit," Ino starts, changing position on the stool, setting her drink down, "I like to flaunt what I got, you know? If a guy wants to buy me a drink, thinking that I'll blow him, like I'm some kinda whore, or something, then that's his shitty attitude, not mine."

"I agree, with the - uh - idea of what you're saying… But -"

"Besides! Hinata needs to learn how to maneuver herself, or else all the men in her life will keep taking advantage of her. She needs to know the _rules_ before she can break them, you know?"

"The rules," Tenten laughs, "C'mon, Ino, really?"

"Yes! The rules, _their_ rules! If you don't learn their rules, you can't shove 'em in their faces. You can't take what you need if you don't know their game. And _that_ is _our_ game," Ino announces, as though quoting herself, glowing with pride, picking up her drink, slugging it, "And, anyway, your experience with men is weird, though, Tenten."

"Is it?"

"Yes! Are you kidding me? The two men you see the most are _Rock Lee_ and _Might Guy_."

Tenten laughs like a screaming whip, heads turn in the crowd. Hinata laughs, too, in her small, quiet way. The bar becomes easier, lighter, maneuverable She feels nimble and smart and hot. There was something she liked, she decides, about the purple man, but not anything she'd keep. She liked the way he disgusted her. How sincere he was about conniving and lying and seducing. It was sexy. It was like black velvet and skinny-dipping and falling from great heights.

"I mean, shit, Tenten," Ino asks, gin trickling down her chin, wiping it away with her knuckles, "Are they _both_ virgins? Lee and Guy?"

Tenten keeps laughing, like she's in a triathlon of laughter. Hinata hides a smile. She feels devious and unafraid and wonders if this is how Ino _always_ feels.

"Surely, right? They must be virgins," Ino keeps talking, rolling, flashing her white teeth, "Neither of them ever ever ever does any of the weird shit men do. Like, ever. Ever. They're just too strange to be like that. What with the leotards and the hair. Their freaking leg weights. All the thumbs-up and shit. And their _chivalry_. I mean, really? It's almost endearing, honestly, the chivalry, just 'cause it's so damn medieval and they don't expect anything in return. At least they're kinda sweet and don't play games. But nobody'd ever have sex with either of them, at least not until marriage of some other weird orthodox Will of Fire shit."

Hinata glances over to the pool tables and makes eye contact with Kiba. He looks sad, then he grins at her. Naruto is bent over, shooting.

"Plus," Ino continues, crossing her legs, "You could body slam most men in Konoha, even Jonin, I bet. Maybe not Sakura, but you could out-punch, like, the Sixth or any of the Guardsmen. You do that training, too, right? Walking around on your hands all day?"

Tenten swallows her laughter, nodding her head, tears in her eyes. Her body is empty of laughter. She feels like a crushed aluminum can.

"See? You just don't understand how girls like Hinata, and me - and I? And I? Wait."

"I," Hinata says, re-joining the conversation, settling into her stool, the goosepimples of her neck rising in swaths, like a military procession. Tenten chuckles.

"Yes," Ino says, pointing, pointing again, "Yes. I. Hinata and I."

"Still kinda mean," Tenten says, not even believing it anymore.

"Nah."

Laughing, Tenten grabs her beer and remembers it's empty and sets it back down too hard.

"Hows the drink," she asks. Hinata considers, biting her lower lip.

"It's good."

"Really?"

"No, no it's not."

Everyone laughs, all four of them.

"Does it taste like piss," Ino asks. First, she is a princess, all promiscuity and modesty; then, she is a trucker, all curse words and unabashed honesty. Tenten laughs, Hinata smiles.

"Or," Ino keeps going, nostrils flaring, "What about period blood? Does it taste like _vag_?"

Ino and Tenten burst into tearful laughter, then Hinata laughs too. For the first time, she's happy at a bar. She feels like an adventurer, like a successful anthropologist. Maybe its the whiskey, or the purple man's residue lust, or the aphrodisiac of laughter.

"Its kind of spicy. Like - like, um," she replies, blushing, flushing; then, in a fit of wild drunken freedom, she makes a certain hand gesture. Ino and Tenten howl with laughter, slapping the top of the bar, rattling the glasses and ice. Hinata glows with pride. Ino blinks.

" _Anyway_ , Hinata," she says, and something falls in Hinata's gut, she folds her hands into her lap, "I gotta call you out on something."

"Ino," Tenten says, still high from the laughter. Ino sits up straighter, looks into the Byakugan.

"Why are you here?"

"Huh?"

"I mean, its obvious you're only here 'cause Naruto's here. Why do you let him drag you around everywhere?"

"I - I want to be with my friends," she says. Tenten blinks, frowns.

"Don't even talk, Ino, you do the same thing to Sai."

"Sai doesn't know any better, though. He's just - he's always calm, in any situation, basically. Hinata though, Hinata gets nervous and flustered and clearly is agonized having to be here in this noisy, dark, you know, _place_ , with all the men and shit here. She wants to go _home_ , and knit, or something - well, she _wants_ to have sex with her boyfriend, really."

Hinata blushes. Tenten purses her lips, her knuckles turn white.

"But, Naruto's not getting laid, like he totally could, 'cause he just brings you _out_ all the time, to places you don't even _like_ , and then he just goes and plays with his boyfriends while you get hit on by sleeze-balls," Ino says, hands flailing, tumbling into a rant, " _And_ , he interrupts you a lot! Like, _way_ too much!"

"Well"-

"Listen, Hinata. You don't understand, you know, 'cause you're the way you are, but I'm _never_ going to be a housewife. I'll keep owning my family flower shop, and whatever, but I want to be an _asset_ not a, not a pretty picture, you know? _You_ know, Tenten."

"I don't have to worry about that," she responds, almost business-like.

"Yeah, okay, but still. Hinata - don't let them take away your talents. You have skills, and potential, and - well, whatever, anyway. You can keep being a shinobi, here. You should apply for Jonin. Get someone to vouch for you - you only need three. The Sixth would do it, so would Shikamaru and me, too, I'd vouch Shit, so would Lee and maybe your daddy."

Hinata stares at her hands, feeling empty and strange and a little cold. The laughter from before keeps echoing in her body, like a ghost of itself, becoming fainter.

Tenten grabs her whiskey, takes a sip, make a face, sets it down.

"Did Miss Hinata ever intend to become a shinobi, I wonder," Sai says, and the trio blinks. His face is waxy and wan, like the bottom of a ceramic bowl, with small narrow eyes, like a masque. There's something stilted about him, at all times, something scarecrow-like. Like a contrived uncertainty. Controlled, deliberate. He is a shinobi forever, in any given situation or circumstance. Hinata realizes what he has that she does not: precision.

"Holy shit, Sai," Tenten says, grinning, relieved, "How long were you there?"

He smiles with closed eyes, the Sai smile. Ino stares at him, pupils dilating.

"It's good to see you, Sai," Hinata starts to say, stopping when Ino grabs his collar, hisses something into his ear, then announces, "I have to go to the bathroom," pulling him along with, into the din of the crowd.

"Is she - are they-" Hinata stumbles, glancing to Tenten, in wonder.

"Yep," she responds, reaching across to grab Ino's gin, "Eh - why does she always squeeze the lime in like that? Too much tart."

Then, they are quiet together, listening the sounds of the bar. All the shouting and chattering, the music playing over the speakers, the odd clack of pool balls. This is a vacuum of noise and sweat, people ordering drinks, gossiping, flirting, telling stories and lies. The music plays across the top of everything, inserting itself into the gaps and empty spaces. Dance music, quick and rhythmic beats, two singers shouting out with the velvet of their throats, in unison, with every fiber, like trumpets, all brass and thunder.

"Do you like this song?" - Tenten asks, setting Ino's drink down on the bar-top.

Nodding without deciding, Hinata swivels around in the stool, angling herself towards Tenten. Immediately, a guy snatches Ino's old seat. He's not as handsome as the purple man, but there's something good about his shoulders and the tight black t-shirt he wears. She keeps her back to him but feels him watching, his eyes running up and down her hair and waist.

"What about the bar, you like the bar?" - Tenten asks, again, peering over Hinata's shoulder, 'watching the cave door', as her sensei used to say.

"I guess so. It seems fun. Naruto took me here, once before, on a Wednesday."

"It's better when it's less crowded."

"Yeah."

They are quiet, again, looking past each-other's faces. The guy behind her orders a drink - a shot of jaeger. Tenten sips Ino's, drops her eyes to Neji's eyes - the Byakugan. She feels warm and sad and full of regrets, like her gut holds a rancid soup. Life, from now on until the end, is something torn and off-center, like it's the wrong timeline, like she's waiting for a message, from God, answering why everything is always so fucked up. Tenten takes another sip.

"Good dance music, though, even though nobody dances here, for some reason. Do you ever dance? I don't think I've ever seen you dance."

Hinata shakes her head, and Tenten clucks her tongue then laughs. This laugh is windless.

"Neji never danced either. The rest of us did, when we'd hold, you know, post-mission parties, and whatever, but he never liked to dance, I don't think he ever once did dance, actually, not that I saw, anyway. Do any of the Hyuuga dance?"

"Well, there's traditional, uhm, movements. Like Tai Chi, I guess, but for the Gentle Fist training… So, no. No, we don't dance."

Tenten laughs, Hinata giggles. Neji never giggled, not even once. He hardly ever laughed, either. But there was something gentle about him, like there is about Hinata. Something silent and protective that began to appear after he learned the truth of his father. Tenten takes another sip, feeling herself on a sort of precipice, rocking back and forth on the edge of something tall and pointed. The war memories have texture, noise, and smell; the war memories are like a swarm of bees. First, you hear them, the buzzing. Then, they attack you, surround you, and you can only flail and be stung.

"None of the Hyuuga dance, huh," she says into the absent void, setting the drink down too lightly upon the bar, bitting her tongue and dragging herself back into the current moment. The current moment, sometimes, is like wearing a heavy and woolen coat that you have to wear even during the summer, it makes you slow and dumb and tired. The past is easier to sit inside of because the past forces itself upon you; there is no struggle if you don't struggle. The future never exists.

Reaching out, Hinata touches her chin. Tenten blinks, open her mouth, closes it. Hinata brings back her hand, collapsing it with the other in her lap.

"Hanabi likes to dance, I think? She likes to go out, a lot, at night. She's too young for that, though. She's way too young for that."

"She's a teenager, now."

"Only fifteen."

"I had just become a Chunin, when I was her age. Leading teams of Genin around. Going beyond the Fire Country borders, with Neji and Lee… The first time I killed someone, I think I was twelve? No, thirteen. I was thirteen, I think… Why isn't she, like, going on missions?"

"She's the heiress, now," Hinata says, strained with burden, someone else's pain as well as her own; Tenten blinks, smiles, nods; Hinata keeps talking as if talking will eat away the bad memories, like a coup de-throning the war, "The heiress doesn't really go on Konoha-led missions. She's supposed to survive and take over the clan one day. So her missions, if you can call them that, are mostly political in nature and invented by the clan. Banquets, balls, going to speeches and things like that, Alliance things, Daimyo things, you know. Just diplomacy stuff and business. She goes to lots of parties in ballrooms at famous people's mansions. She doesn't take it seriously, though."

"That's too bad."

"She just like to flirt with father's friends."

Tenten laughs, a wood-slap laugh of surprise, "Well - she's getting older, I guess… I bet Naruto dances, though."

"Well, sometimes, yeah."

"He's pretty exuberant. I bet he'd be great at a wedding reception."

Hinata laughs, and Tenten grins while watching the guy in Ino's old stool. He's staring at Hinata's hair, playing with the empty shot glass in his hands. There's a scar running down his cheekbone, but he doesn't strike her as a shinobi. Something about the way he carries himself, slouching and lazy like a caterpillar; he doesn't have that missing thing you see in shinobi and soldiers and the homeless, like a piece of their eyes are gone, the glint in their pupils plucked out. He doesn't have that missing thing. That's how she knows he's not a shinobi.

"Hey, what's your name?" - he asks with too much force, in too large and bold a font, as though he'd been struggling to keep the question caged up in his mouth.

He is met by silence. Tenten sips the gin. Hinata looks down at her hands.

Blinking, confused, hurt, he taps Hinata's shoulder. His fingers and big and thick, like guns.

"Never Yours," Tenten responds, slurring, surprised at her own slurring.

"I didn't ask you."

"I know," she says, grabbing Hinata's hand like a girlfriend, "C'mon, let's go join the others."

"Okay," she replies, leaving her drink on the bar, trying not to look at the guy who hit on her. His staring is like corkscrews, whittling through the wood of her patience. Ino would have manipulated him into buying them drinks. Hinata just hurries off, keeping hold of Tenten's hand.

"Hey, buddy," Tenten says, pointing at Hinata's drink, "You can have that one there. Maybe you'll get an indirect kiss."

He laughs, spirited and relieved, as though freed from the failure of rejection. They leave him there, weaving through the crowd. The thrum of bodies, the solid block of human animals, It's like being digested, pushing your way through the skin and muscles and hair and cloth. Hands and elbows and sneakers and loud grinning faces and the smells of sweat, liquor, and cologne. Someone, or everyone, one after the other, anyone they press or push through, tries to grab Hinata's shoulder, then breasts, then waist, then wrists, ass, throat and hair; TenTen pushes them all away, sacrificing her own body, being touched and clutched and pulled. It doesn't matter to her, anyway, what they do to her, where they imprint themselves, their texture, their pressure. Her own body never mattered to her, really, perhaps because her training was so much more strenuous and painful than most of her peers, but when someone sinks their fingers into her hair-buns, she stops and grits her teeth and raises her right hand in the Shunsin sign.

— — —

Naruto's thoughts are moored by the things Kiba said; truths exposed like empty shells washed up on a cold gray beach. It was messy; Kiba shouted, and sputtered, and spit, and interrupted himself. But, he pushed an image into Naruto's head: Hinata, in a kimono, kneeling in front of old noblemen, holding a tea-cup aloft, deciding whether or not to drop it.

Meanwhile, Kiba yowls and cackles and drinks, in lieu of apology. Pretending he wants to win the game by playing too hard, too fast, too sudden. He is a performer, now, and an anarchist of himself. As though declaring yourself lawless can douse all the mean things you've said. As though shouting louder, shooting hard, and dancing faster can _undo_.

"Damn y"- he stops himself from finishing the sentence when Naruto sinks a ball, "Damnit!"

Naruto just stands there. Inside, at the bottom of a dark, obsessive pit, Kurama snoozes.

"Kiba, Naruto!" - TenTen calls out, the girls arriving in a gust of wind. As the chakra in the air fluctuates, settling, the over-head lamp swings, transforming the geometry of the orange cider light. Like a tide of amber angles, the light washes over the boys, on one side of the table, then the girls on the other.

"Yo!" - Kiba says, raising both drinks. Naruto looks up.

When he sees her, his girlfriend, he knows she is beautiful in ways nobody and nothing else can be beautiful - even landscapes, moments of clarity, art and the end of war, let alone other people. And, he knows she is compassionate and inspired and fueled by raw willpower, whose spirit is stronger than her body. He also knows she was, and still is, the first to believe in him; even during the worst time in his life, in transition between the orphanage and the Academy dormitories, she was a little spot of light blocked and stolen by the visceral, tangible, drowning hatred of everyone else.

However, there are new things, now, that he sees in her.

Tiny curls of regret, hidden in the way she stands by the table, the way she holds her elbows and slouches to make her chest smaller. Strings of fear, too, in the way her presence seems to swallow conversation, how she shrinks inside his peripheries as if becoming invisible. Darker things. Cruel things which appear only in transit, like raindrops when they crash, the shape the water becomes within the crash, visible and existing for just a spec of a moment. Quick, sudden shadows in the lines of her face, in the fall of her hair. Violence, almost, in the way she looks at certain people and men, especially older men.

There's something about her that, in his weakest moments and her strongest moments, frightens him. Something alien and horned and Kagyua-like or, maybe, just something woman-like. The apple-eating women who shine with secret knowledge while they wait, while they endure, while they watch us floundering in the shallow pond of masculinity. We used to lock them in rooms and dress them in corsets, and heels, and long rug-like dresses, so that they could not conspire nor run away. Now, they roam and observe and take notes.

"Hey," Naruto says, measuring the distance between balls, "Hey, Hinata."

"Hi."

He could never hide his emotions well. He used to paint them onto monuments, and scream them into faces of teachers, and declare them on battlefields. Naruto is an honest person, rare amongst Shinobi.

When they make eye contact, in greeting, in their hellos, something in her expression tightens, like rope becoming taut on a bay-liner; then, all these things he now sees disappear, like smoke in the wind, leaving just the vanity mirror of her face. Her Byakugan are opal and empty and reveals nothing but reflect everything, like one-way windows.

He looks away.

"Who's winning?" - Tenten asks, sipping the drink in her hand, Ino's old drink, gin and tonic and ice and crushed pulp of lime.

"Me!"- Kiba snarls, grinning and scowling all at once, something angry and horny and regretful glinting inside his dog-devil-eyes. Tenten smirks inwardly, takes another sip.

"Shut up," Naruto says, leaning to shoot, pulling the cue back. Hinata blinks at the snap of his command. Kiba sips once from each beer.

They all watch as he shoots, the cue-ball bounding away, evading everything except the eight-ball, which clacks and rolls and slows to a stop at the edge of a side pocket. Kiba crackles, laughing. Tenten grins.

"Shit," Naruto mutters, and Hinata touches his shoulder, the sleeve of his sweatshirt, almost tentative as though he is a new person in her life. This person who plays pool and says things like 'shit' and 'shuttup' and a casual 'hey' when she - referred to, affectionately, by his fans in the newspapers, as "best girl" - arrives at his side. He says 'hey.' And, he leans away to shoot pool. And, he tells Kiba to 'shuttup.' This person, whose shoulder she touches, whose sleeves she pulls, is Naruto, but he is also something new, too, neither Naruto nor Kurama. Instead, a smaller person, stilted by uncertainty, and self-doubt, and fear.

Her body responds to this new version of her boyfriend; her chakra rushes with ambition.

"Nice shot, man," Kiba says, an insult, nonchalant filth, a tiny laurel leaf, a whiskey treaty, an offered cigarette. Grinning, Naruto stands up a little straighter. Hinata presses into his arm, holding him by the elbow. She likes it there, her throne, her place of prominence. She grew up with blue blood, an heiress and a noble, but the seat of power she prefers is her boyfriend's arm. Flesh and blood and warmth, something real she can touch and hold and hang onto, so unlike the vast empty rooms of her childhood.

Tenten laughs, cackling, howling, red in the face.

"What the _fuuuck_ is happening here? Holy Rikudo, I haven't felt so encumbered or awkward or all this unspoken tension, or whatever since, I don't know, since Neji and Lee hated each-other, back when we first became Genin!"

Kiba laughs, first. It begins trickling, like a leak in a dam; then, the dam cracks and snaps in half; his laughter floods the room. Naruto laughs in the fox way, with closed eyes and a little shame. Hinata laughs into her knuckles, petite and polite and mannered; it is a masque of a laugh.

Tenten sighs into her gin.

"My turn," Kiba says, handing the beers to Naruto, taking the cue stick.

"Why do we have to hold these? Let's just set them on the edge of the table."

"Whatever, mah-dude," Kiba says, settling himself into shooting position. There's something sexual about it all, the posturing, the body movements, bending over the table with a rod in your hands, playing with balls, the hustling culture. Sex and beer and billiards and money and winning and losing and choking.

Kiba pulls back his shot.

Blinking, turning away, Naruto takes a sip of beer. It tastes like soil, like hops and mud.

"Did you drink from mine?"

"Yep."

"You bastard."

Snorting, laughing, Kiba re-sets, pulling back on the stick.

Setting the beer down, on the edge of the pool table, Naruto takes a sip of his own, orange slices coated in Splenda, and smiles at Hinata. She smiles back, and he smiles again. It becomes a volley of smiles; then, they both break into laughter.

"Kiba, you're gonna miss," Tenten says, indulging herself, for the love tsukkomi, pointing,"Aim for that one instead."

"Which one."

"The one I pointed to."

"You didn't point."

"Of course I did! You just didn't _see_ me point. It was even in the scene description."

"I'm all bent over, here, biding my shot. I can't be waiting for you to point!"

" _That_ one."

"I'm stripes."

"I know."

"Listen, Tenten, listen for a sec. I am the best player in the Konoha Eleven, no doubt."

"I heard Sai is really good."

"Well, he's not one of the _Eleven_. He'd be like, the thirteenth or fourteenth or something."

"The fourteenth of eleven?"

"Sure! Yeah, sure. He's the fourteenth."

"Who's the, like, _thirteenth_ , then?"

"Sasuke is the twelfth, obviously."

"Obviously."

"And the fourteenth would be, um" -

" _Thirteenth_."

"Oh! Right, right. Um."

"Maybe it's one of the Sand Siblings."

"They're Suna, though. They're the Suna Eleven."

"Eleven?"

"Or three, or whatever. Plus those two Kazekage fan-girls, the one named after clothes and that other one. _And_ , that fuinjutsu chick from the war. So, the Suna Six. That works. That's a good one, actually."

"Suna Six. It's like a serpent hiss; I like it, but you forgot about that guy Lee fought, with the taijutsu. And his two teammates, too… Hey! I heard some rumors, though, that one of them, one of the Sand Siblings, might move here."

"I don't really give a shit, to be honest. Tee bee aych, actually."

"What?"

"The thirteenth can be Akamaru. Actually, yeah. Definitely. Where is he, anyway?"

"What?"

"Sai! I mean, the thir-fourteenth."

"Oh! Ino took him to the bathroom, earlier."

"Wh- Oh. Oh! Damnit! Is that a thing, now?"

She laughs, then sips her gin, "I _know_ , she was looking pretty fine today, too."

Kiba looks up from his shot, glances at her, lingers, analyzes, the mechanism of his brain chugging; then, he blinks and looks back to the game, "It's the skirt she's wearing. And the way it, like, _sticks_ to her."

"Like this," Tenten says, making an hour-glass with her hands, the ice in her drink chingling, "And the waist! Uncovered. Belly-button showing. She likes to show off."

"I don't mind. Shit. She should do gravure, or something."

"Hey! I heard she earned an epithet, you know, like other Jonin and prominent ninja in the old days."

"No shit?"

"Ms. Beautiful, they're calling her, in the, like, gossip columns."

"That's lame," Kiba says, standing back up, "She's a stone cold killer and they're - whatever."

Tenten laughs, watching Kiba re-set his shot, "Neji would beat you, too, by the way."

"Well, far corner pock," Kiba says and takes the shot. Clack and zip line, the ball drops with a thunk. Standing up straight, he stretches his back and yawns.

"Lucky."

"Nah."

"Lightning strike."

"My affinity is earth, actually. _Doton_. Like, Do a ton. 'Cause I do a ton."

"A ton of what?"

"Girls. Billiards."

"Just a lucky lottery ticket, basically. You just get lots of lottery tickets."

"I don't gamble, much, actually. I'm a proper shinobi, I walk with certainty."

" _My_ turn," she says, taking the cue, strutting to the other side of the table, scanning the array of remaining balls.

"Wait. You're not in this game. Take the next one."

"I'll take Naruto's set. I'll come from behind and win, just like Jashin intended."

"What? No way, I want to _beat_ him. Naruto" - and he looks around; they're near the patio door, holding hands, kissing.

"You lost twice, now, Kiba."

"Shut up."

Laughing, she measures her shot; she takes aim.


	3. Chapter 3

"You're going out tonight? To the Utatane District?"

Hanging her white doctor's coat, smoothing out the sleeves so they fall through the locker in a more pleasing way, Sakura glances over her back, smiling with sterility.

"When you get old enough, I'll take you," she says, pulling all the pens and little things from her pockets - paperclips, an eraser-head, white cotton balls. These things we somehow collect as the day commences, as work sours, turning sunless, and the afternoon sobers into evening. She places them in a dixie-cup, on the top shelf of the locker and grabs a tin of breath mints.

As she pops one in her mouth and swallows, Hori watches like a violet painting of herself.

"Sensei?" she asks, twisting her hands together.

"Hmm?"

"Nevermind," she says, dropping her hands to her sides.

"What is it?"

"It's nothing. Sorry," she says, sinking her hands into her pockets, holding them there like small round stones. Sakura closes the tin, placing it back on the shelf.

Sitting down on a bench, feeling vaguely like she's back in the Academy locker-room, Sakura shucks off her green plastic crocs, sets them down in the base of the locker, below the hanging coats and satchel, next to her clean white sneakers, and begins massaging her soles.

"Back before the moon fell," she grunts, rubbing her knuckles in deep, bangs breaking from their clip, falling over her forehead like coral drapery, "I wore heels to work. Everyday."

"Really?"

"Yep," she laughs, setting her foot down, digging into the other, "But then - I don't know. It just didn't seem worth it. All these disasters. All these apocalypses. I didn't want to die in heels. I mean, even my mentor, the Fifth, she went to _war_ in heels. These big black heels, she had. When I was a kid, I liked to try them on when she wasn't around. I could hardly walk, they were so big. When I'd try and take steps, my little feet would just come right out."

Hori folds her hands together, watching her mentor's back. The air conditioning hums. The lights do not flicker.

"She went to war like that, in those things," Sakura says, setting both feet on the hard, tiled floor, "It just didn't seem worth it, to me, you know."

"Yeah."

"You were good today," Sakura says, pinning her bangs back up, showcasing her famous purple diamond, "Helping people pass on is a part of this job, and you handled it with dignity. Like a shinobi. You were a good shinobi, today."

Nodding, almost bowing, Hori watches Sakura pull out a pair of sneakers. Ballooned and white like toy blimps. Stuffing her feet in like packaging, tying the long, thick, white laces tight with something like violence, her knuckles sharp and jagged, Sakura exhales like a shaking chain-link fence.

"Sensei?"

Something shifts in the ventilation; a fan turns on in the ceiling, whirring and muffled, murmuring. Down the hallway, a door closes, locks. In the ceiling, a sconce flickers.

"The director needs to work on this power thing," Sakura mutters, pulling up the tongues of her shoes, standing from the bench, straightening her lime-green blouse. Her bracelets and bangles glint under the fluorescence. Her silver earrings burn like fever. Staring at herself in the small, square mirror she keeps pinned to the inside of her locker's door, Sakura undoes her spiky pony-tail, combing through the coarse, unwashed hair with her fingers, before swearing and tying it back up.

Hori clasps her hands together, rubbing the heels of her palms, witnessing a new conceit in her teacher. Something almost adolescent. It both excites and frightens her, inspires and saddens her.

Between them, the difference in years is shallow, not even a decade, yet Sakura exudes an unnoticed traditionalism within herself. As if choosing not to wear heels is so rare. As if working without make-up is such a rebellion. As if pony-tails, crocs and interpersonal sterility is a premonition rather than a mundanity.

At the hospital, there is only the work. Everything is urgent. People die if you linger, drag your feet, or sit down too long. Within routine urgency, even the saving of lives becomes like coding, like software, something automatic and self-engaged, happening within the modem of the hospital culture.

As such, there is never time for eyeliner and visual flirtation, or pretty hair, or poor-fitting good-looking brasseries. There isn't even time to ask why there is not time. From Sakura, there emanates authority, maternity, and excellence. She speed-walks the tiled, white hallways of the hospital like an inventor, a hero, a captain. They will build busts of her, write her name on plaques, textbooks, and walls. She will remain known and appreciated for generations.

They will not remember her vanity. There is nothing wrong with vanity. There is nothing to remember. Hori knows this and, in that way, already surpassed her mentor. She does not struggle with 'looking good' at work. She does not make a show of her modesty and professionalism.

This particular moment will stick with her, for years, until she rises high enough in rank to stop caring; she will recall watching her mentor, Haruno Sakura, Jonin, war hero, parting her bangs, dotting the corners of her eyes, rubbing her chalked thumb against the Yin Seal, on a weekend night in the hospital locker-room. As a professional woman, Hori will wonder, then, what she's doing wrong.

"Are you meeting someone?" she asks, sticking her hands in her pockets, wringing her thumbs between her forefingers.

"Hmm? Oh. No. No, I'm not. Just friends."

Pulling out her gray, weather-bit parka, Sakura shakes it out, running her fingers over the leather elbow-patches, straightening the wilted collars. Fumbling for the sleeves, zipping it up, she feels like a little girl again, all that sudden heaviness, that sudden clumsiness of the extra layer. Her father used to button her coats and tie her shoes. She'd stand with outstretched arms, like a scarecrow, staring at his star-shaped hair-do, all those knotted stubborn curls, his chicken-feet eyes, his slur of bad jokes, the way his face changed when he smiled, like eggs cracking open, like cobwebs being spun. He always smelled like lavender tonic, musk and dark beer. For years, he told stories of the brewery he wanted to build. How they'd sell brews from each of the Five Major Nations, uniting the ninja world through 'mostly functional alcoholism.' How she would quit being a shinobi and marry some 'poor, sober fool' and raise 'zero to twenty pink-haired kids.' How the 'noble Haruno Clan' would 'make Konoha drunk again.' She used to laugh at him, tease him, hug him goodbye before leaping out the front door to train with Tsunade, or study at the library, or head out on the next mission. Even during the war, his smile never faded. Living in a small, canvas tent after Pain's Invasion, he filled the air with puns and aspirations and mostly false anecdotes. Six months ago was the last time she saw him. She doesn't know why. Work, her continued studies, blowing off steam on the weekends. There are a hundred reasons she could cite, none of which feel true. Maybe she got sick of his bad humor. Or the way he dramatized things. His silly little lies. His inadvertent fatherly sexism. Maybe this is something of a masquerade, Sakura trying to be a grown up, trying to live in a correct manner. It confuses her, this guilt, the way time passes by accident, the way people fade out of your life, like drawings from sunlit paper, until all that remains is an outline.

"Well, that was a long time ago," Sakura says, smiling at her sneakers, the hungry-looking laces, the gleaming tiled floor. Something in the air vents whines like a tired puppy. Something in the walls creaks like old wooden furniture.

"Well," Hori says fumbling with her small hands, glancing sideways towards the door, "Be safe, out there, Sensei."

Sakura laughs like a cracked whip. It feels good to laugh. When she laughs, something evolves inside her torso. Starting in her abdomen, in the crux of her rib-cage, like a spiky light expanding, then roving upwards towards her chest where the light disappears like broken genjutsu.

During the war effort, sometimes she would laugh when performing mundane tasks, like counting out rations for the medical teams, or checking on loads of supplies - syringes, food pills, beddings and gauze wrap - or carting carcasses towards the mass graves, dumping them in like bundles of old coats, where they'd land amongst each-other like rubber mannequins.

She was tired all the time back then. And high on food pills. And angry. She hated their enemies. The Akatsuki. The Sound Village. The Zetsu. She hated them so deeply, so intrinsically, so passionately, that sometimes she would laugh with hatred. She felt evil, back then, and it felt good but never strange.

Only after returning to the relative normalcy of Konoha, to the dryness of post-war therapy sessions, to the long nights of drinking and chatting, then to the personal slum of her studio apartment, only in those moments did she feel unlike herself, did she feel guilty.

Part of her wishes she could experience the Infinite Tsukoyomi, too, like almost everyone else. When they woke up, the bandages falling away, it became clear that the world had changed. People were different; everyone had become a stranger. This new crushed light seemed to exist in their eyes, in their voices, in the way they moved and interacted. Even now, a few years later, she can't quite ascertain what has changed in definite terms. Only the abstractions, only the _feeling_ , only the sense that she is not a part of something new.

"Hey," she says, staring at the mirror in her locker, "What was the Infinite Tsukoyomi like?"

"It was the most beautiful and vile thing I have ever experienced," Hori responds, as if prepared with notes, as if giving a pre-rehearsed interview.

"Well, thanks," Sakura says, shutting the locker door, ducking her head through the loop of her satchel, making sure the strap doesn't stick between her breasts, "You have a good night, okay? I'd say don't grow up too fast, but maybe you should visit the Graveyard of Heroes, soon. Walk amongst the stones, there. Visit the monument and read the names. I'm sure they'll be etching his on there soon, within the week."

Saluting, Hori smiles with contrived gratitude, like a violet unfolding.

— — —

Boots crunching against the snow-encrusted sidewalk, she emerges from the bar; the bouncer looks up from his book; she greets him with a small nod and surveys the street.

It's like a zombie invasion outside. All the drunks and smokers, swaying and staggering. Flickering street-lamps. The smell of gas, sewage. Trash strewn about the asphalt: newspapers, smashed bottles, bits of random plastic. The Utatane District bares a certain resemblance, on weekend nights, to post-apocalypse. Like a tribal-urban zone of survivors. Instead of Infected, however, everyone is simply drunk, and high, and horny.

"There's a good wall, there," he says, pointing, his fingers turning pink in the cold. Grabbing his hand, she follows him down the sidewalk, past a row of smokers wearing flannel, around a stack of frost-laden hay-bales leftover from the harvest festival.

"Here," he says, reaching an ivy-covered white-brick wall. Pink, green, and blue clouds of graffiti: names, initials, phalluses. Rows of leaf-less bushes line the top of the wall, like ribcages of foliage, reaching through the links in a chain fence. A descending wind blows, rattling the fence, like a razor made of ice cutting into their faces, leaving imaginary scars. It's kind of fun, Hinata muses to herself, all this unpleasantness.

"If we lean against the wall, the wind won't reach, yahknow," and he laughs small, as if unsure or insulted. His bright orange parka makes him look like a big-game hunter. The scarf color she chose for him clashes.

Hinata makes a small sound of affirmation, like a spring bouncing upwards, after sipping from her cocktail. It's neon green, like radiation, but it tastes like biting down on a coin. Zinging her teeth, the roof of her mouth, the underside of her tongue - all numb.

They lean their backs against the wall, pushing shoulder to shoulder like children on a school-bus, hoping to snare a catch of each-others warmth, texture, pressure.

"Kiba didn't need to buy these," she says, raising her glass to eye-level, the ice clinking. Naruto simpers, looks away, searching for something to talk about. Taking a sip from his own, he grimaces. She laughs at him, the way his face tightens when he tastes something he doesn't like. For a passing moment, she sees something fatherly in him. Fathers are grimacing creatures. They think everything is sour.

"You'll be a good Hokage," she says, her statement visible as wintry breath, written with vapor, made extra-true by physicalization. He smiles at her. The vapor scatters into the air, disappearing, twirling away from itself like all things must eventually do. She feels like a locomotive, like her throat and lungs is an exhaust pipe. Automation. Transition. Industrialization. All these forests being torn down; something sinks in her chest, becoming hollow and blue. Then, the guilt. Her family is wealthy, but they can't do anything to protect what is important. Not in the modern world.

"Hehe, thanks," he says, moments too late, looking up instead of at her. The sky is like the sea at night, glimmering with the rumor of constellations. For generations, that was the map: the shapes and colors in the sky. People found their paths by looking up.

Nowadays, the city smokes like it isn't afraid of lung cancer. Plumes of pollution rise from each new skyscraper, soaking into the atmosphere. Bright, blinking lights of the city fan outwards, forming something like a force-field, rubbing the stars from the sky. Construction, incineration, disposal, filtration and power grids. Each activity of the ever-modernizing Konoha slowly, quietly erases the map above us.

We become lost.

In the past, in the not so distant past, and in some still living societies, starlessness would be a sign of disaster, a bad omen, an evil prophecy, proof of doom. Now, it is routine. It is expected. Our collective death, our extinction, hovers above us, cradling us with un-transparent arms. When the sky finishes changing, the atmosphere will break open like an overripe fruit.

"I wish you could see Mount Myoboku, yahknow. I'm going to bring you there, one day. I promise," he says, almost whispering, his tone issuing a certain respect for grandeur. If she had pupils, they would dilate; this is a benefit of being a Hyuuga; people cannot see your lust.

"Here. Maybe this'll work," he says, holding his fist out. She stares at his knuckles, his curled fingers, the hand of a man. Making a fist, too, she connects it with his. Electricity, chakra. Images form, swirling in her thoughts like colorful cloudy water. She tastes aluminum, moss. Something smells like fog.

Then, she is there, flying. Acres stretching out below her, the quilt-work of agriculture, the long loping hills and prairies and fields.

All the places he visited in his travels with Jiraiya. All the landscapes, rivers and mountains, lakes and valleys. Each forest, each cavern, each canyon and beach and sea. Becoming visible to her, unrolling beneath her, as if drawn by crayon, as if presented in a series of scrolls.

She sees the Desert of Red Sand, where mirages create mazes of illusions, where you think you are lost when, truly, you never moved a step. She sees the Kingdom of Apes, where battalions of monkeys, chimps and gorillas scour the mountains, dressed in battle armor, searching for illegal aliens. She sees the pristine, marble beaches of Isla de Azul, and the jungles of the ancient Stone Legion, and the ruins of a several miles vast coliseum tucked away in an undersea cove. Coral reefs, abandoned silos and farms, the hot steaming breath of strange, foreign cities. Open air markets full of seafood. Gambling dens full of purple smoke. Power-lines stretching across miles of dirt roads, empty yellow fields.

Then, she sees the mountain. Rings of white clouds circling the peak. Snowy slopes, deep black crags, tall vertical cliffs. Climbing with chakra, ropes, bare hands and feet. Almost falling. Rocks collapsing. Footholds crackling. Canyons traversed over rickety wooden bridges. Tunnels narrowing, winding through the mountain like serpents. Vast patches of brambles, massive sticky burrs and slithering green vines.

Finally, the front gate emerges. Down a wide limestone path. All the jungle cut away. Pillars and statues, a barrier made of senjutsu, a steaming hot spring. On a throne-like lillie-pad sits an old toad, twirling an impossibly long white bead, smoking a blue, twisted pipe, asking them questions, riddles, insulting them and then muttering in the toad-language when answered correctly. As the gate opens, the barrier dissipates, Mount Myoboku revealing itself like a hidden fairy grove, then -

She blinks. The street is cold and warm. She lowers her fist.

"Sorry," he says, grumbling, chuckling, "I'll have to show you the rest in person, I guess, yahknow. It's a magical place, yahknow. They use senjutsu to, uh, hide the memories, or something. I don't know," he laughs, rubbing the back of his head, grinning with his eyes closed.

"Thanks," she says, staring at the side of his face. A new version of Naruto appears in her mind's eye, like a photograph unfolding. Naruto is a sage, one who communes with nature energy. Naruto is a naturalist, like so many poets and adventurers and conservationists.

As he looks into the empty, dark sky, she sees a new pain in him. One of many pains living in his internal hotel of pain, each given a key card, complementary breakfasts, and clean sheets with chocolate on the pillows. This new pain is earthly. Born of attachment to the biotic communities, the most innate relationships: human to soil, human to air, human to water. How do you soothe a planet? How do you cradle something so vast and impossible?

Setting her cocktail on top of the wall, she entangles her arm with his and touches his chin with her fingerless mittens. His whiskers are sharp, almost violent. His jaw is like a city block. When did he grow up? When did his body become seductive like this? She presses herself into his form, as if trying to fit her edges along his edges, like two slips of torn paper trying to form one solid page.

He blushes, looking up, then down, then to the side and out at the street.

"Are you drunk," he asks. The street-lanterns look like warm, blue and red bottles. Their light shines inside the frost and ice, covering the pavement.

Shaking her head, she blinks, then blinks again. Something narrows within her, and she sees fear in his bright blue eyes. This is not the fear of war. It is the greater fear of intimacy. As much as he pines for people to understand him, this is also what frightens him most. He is simultaneously the bravest person she knows and also the most childish, the most immature. He is simultaneously the most naive and idealistic person she knows and also the most troubled, the most wise, the most empathetic. He is a man of contradiction and juxtaposition, walking the beam of light shining between paradoxes. In this way, he is also the most centered man she knows. He is a trapeze artist; he is a pimpled toad; he is a shinobi; he is an activist; he is the most of everything.

"Why, are you?"

He shakes his head.

"Okay. Good."

She doesn't know what to say to him. He won't say anything either. The silence is crystalline and opaque.

Conversation has always been difficult for both of them. She talks too little; he talks too much. You would think, together, their voices would be just enough to fill a vase and sustain a nice bouquet. Instead, however, hers just becomes smaller, and smaller, and fainter, and fainter, until it feels like she cannot speak at all, until she feels muted. Where is my voice, she wonders. Inside of his pocket, inside of his clenched fist, inside of his mouth and under his tongue. Right where she left it, and he never gave it back or never noticed it was there or thought it was his.

Now that he is silent, she doesn't know how to fill the silence.

Taking her hand away from his face, she leans back against the wall and looks around the street. All the depravity, the filth, the drug abuse - state-issued, government-approved. This is where people go to ruin their lives, to avoid everything important, to made compounding bad decisions. This is where her friends go, on the weekends. This is where she goes, now, somehow. Her stomach feels sticky, twisted.

There is too much to think about, sometimes, often.

"Kiba is," she says. How do you become close with someone, asserting your sense of self, without diluting their sense of self, without ruining something you love about them?

"He's what?"

"Drunk, I think."

Someone crosses the street, shouting into a cell phone. The words are unintelligible. At first, she tries to understand what he's saying; then, she realizes it's a different language.

"Kumogakure?"

"Yeah. I think so."

Somewhere, around the corner, glass shatters. Laughter, heckling. Wind blowing, the fence above the wall rattling, she presses closer to him; he presses back.

"Someone threw a bottle?"

"Let's stop drinking, tonight, for the night," she says, almost a command. Her cheeks are pink. Her breath is sharp, visible, flaring, taking shape like the Lion's Fist.

"Yeah, yahknow," Naruto says, smiling, reaching above her to place his cocktail on top of the wall, next to hers. A radiator hums, smelling like burnt rubber. Music from the clubs reverberates, bumping, muffled.

"Do you wanna go home?"

She shakes her head, pushing her hands into the pockets of her coat.

"Should we say bye to everyone, first?"

"It's nice outside. Winter is nice, don't you think?"

"Yeah."

— — —

Lulling at an alleyway, Sakura pulls her hands out of her parka; folding them like a copse in front of her mouth, she breaths into them like a smoldering campfire. She doesn't know why she did that. Her hands were warm enough in the coat pockets. She could mould chakra to heat her skin. She could just bare with it, being a shinobi, a veteran of war, one who endures. Maybe there is something aesthetic she wanted to try out. Like she is in a newspaper clipping, or in a movie, or being watched.

A rickshaw passes across the street, drawn by a Chunin she recognizes from the war. His face, jagged and scarred, elicits vague memories. Smoke, formaldehyde. Rocky terrain. The woods on fire. She blinks, biting her tongue, tasting blood, like aluminum, like mercury. In the seat, elevated, half-hidden beneath the privacy of the canopy, two people - citizens, she is sure - kiss. They look like lizards writhing against each-other. Wheels of the cart creaking, rolling across the pavement. Snow falling, light and lilting. As the rickshaw turns the corner, becoming distant noise, she exhales, as if released from some invisible grip. It reminds her of the paralysis jutsu.

A street-light blinks. She smells sausage, grease. Smoke trails up from a bright yellow food stand. Someone laughs, a line forms. Two people in windbreakers. It's too cold for windbreakers. A wind blows through the alley. Something meows. A window slams shut. Music plays from a rooftop, a single guitar stepping through the chords, a bottle being set down, a cigarette being lit - _fliick, fliick, fliick_ \- someone swears; someone laughs.

She blinks, crouches. Leaning against the brick wall. A building, windows, a door, a front step. Something happens in this building. People might live here. Or work here. Or maybe it is already abandoned, left to squatters, the homeless, urban explorers, and graffiti artists. That would be good, she thinks. Everyone deserves a roof, a well-lit room, and some semblance of privacy.

Someone laughs. His laugh is sharp, rude.

Hair still tied in the hospital bun, skin sticky with congealed sweat, she feels unclean, as if harboring a layer of dirt, oil, labor, and her thoughts won't work right, as if her brain is wrapped with saran, foil, zip-locked. Something like a twig snaps in the cavity of her chest. Crushed by the weight of her endeavors, her work hours, her training, her womanhood, she presses her forehead into her knuckles. It bubbles, boils, scalds. Her pulse quickens, trilling, rolling. She imagines fleeing towards home. Her messy studio apartment, that tiny beige cat shedding like an occupation, her futon with wine-stained sheets. It would be a conspiracy of herself, her own little secret, something shinobi-like. She'd sit in the soapy bathwater, knees poking above the surface, a box of rosay on the tiled floor, drinking from a plastic cup, candles along the rim of the tub like fiery pigeons on a wire. She'd watch the fat little flames swaying, drunken, like the final dancers at bar close.

"But, no," she mutters, as her friends' faces appear in her thoughts like blots of watercolor. All of them grinning, with glinting twinkling eyes, convincing her with the wonderful perfect artistry of banter. Tsukkomi - good tsukkomi - takes a certain closeness. Proof of being loved and wanted. Friendship was always the theme of her life. Something ongoing, necessary and wonderful, but difficult to keep and difficult to obtain. As she ages, she realizes you only get one chance to have childhood friends.

"Fuck, fine," she says, pushing herself up off the sidewalk, brushing her parka, straightening her bangs, stuffing her hands back into her pockets, cutting down the wind-blown alley, walking without trepidation past the big blue dumpsters made beautiful by graffiti, the stack of snow-covered pallets that looks like a house in the woods, and the random trash pushed to the side - splintered two-by-fours, spools of gray cordage, animal-like husks of plastic casing. She walks past all of it. She walks like an inventor, a genius, a captain.

Her phone buzzes.

After emerging on the other side, turning the corner onto Eleventh, passing Cherry Pit with its warm reddish table-lamps, the Utatane District appears in the distance, down the long, aching hill of streets, like a mirage revealing its true form when you say the secret password. It looks like a small city of it's own. All the lights and streets and crowds, the noise muffled by distance and wind, and the big front gate, a wooden arch, where you might as well say "open sesame."

She swears.

The Utatane District is ludicrous as it is historical. A place of multi-colored lanterns, rows of pubs with fish-bowl windows, and staggering herds of drunken citizens and shinobi alike. All those new punk bands play here, with women lead singers, in the dirty little dives and legal speakeasies. Every week or so, there's breaking news about a mugging, or a rape, or a murder. It is a district known for depravity, and the love of depravity, and the pride of the depraved, and the fear of domesticity. This is where they escape from the bear-trap of routine, shinobi and citizens, as if casting genjutsu upon oneself. For most, this is a weekend existence. For some, the weekend bleeds into the week and then takes over becoming, essentially, a mediocre Infinite Tsukoyomi. Caught in perpetual infancy, the denizens of the Utatane District like to spit, and chew, and gnash, and drink. Lungs are for smoking. Skin is for touching. Limbs are for dancing.

Sakura has met the kunoichi this is all named for, several times. A buttoned-up, conservative woman who smelled like tin and used to drink undiluted lemon juice. Elder advisor to three Hokage administrations. Veteran of two wars and advisorial operative of two more. Koharu Utatane was the first kunoichi to graduate from the Leaf Academy. She was the third to attain the rank of Jonin. She was the last high-level administrator to request a computer in her office.

There is a certain, inward respect Sakura holds for her elder. In their conversations, prior to the post-war hearings, Koharu was always stern, direct, and never indulgent. Without stating it outright, she dedicated her career to leveling the playing field for kunoichi by keeping expectations high in every facet of shinobidom. In fact, you could say she expected more from women than from men. She was an traditionalist feminist, expecting women to change, to improve, to take what is theirs without disturbing the fragility of men.

As the eras progress, her cultural throne as a pioneer of kunoichi rights dims. The younger generations think less of her. They condemn her for keeping silent. They rue her for having unequal standards. They disregard the idea of 'we can have it all,' citing this as a double standard, an inefficiency, and unhealthy. Particularly, they take note of her following indulgences of the men around her, the Third Hokage and Shimura Danzo. If Koharu ever questioned them, she did not publicize it.

Sakura likes to think she understands Koharu. For several years, it was normal for Sakura to find herself in a room with three of the most important kunoichi in Konoha's history: Koharu Utatane, Kato Shizune, and the Fifth Hokage. Being the youngest, with the lowest rank, Sakura was relegated to coffee duties and note-keeping, but she kept a rapt ear, devouring their words, arguments, philosophies, taking in their experiences as her own.

From them, she learned the futility of pettiness and the importance of hard work, especially for women. You cannot simply be talented, if you are a kunoichi. You cannot simply train everyday, if you are a kunoichi. Although, you _can_ simply be pretty, socially adept, and cunning, accepting missions of diplomacy and espionage, "if you wish to drown," as her master once stated.

That is the temptation she struggled with, as many do. What is so wrong with making a living by taking advantage of patriarchal inequities? We're all trying to get by. What is so wrong with underachieving, striving for mediocrity, choosing to just live? We're all trying to get by. How do you keep respecting yourself? Are you willing to be called a bitch or a cunt or a slut or a prude so many times that the words almost lose meaning?

That is one of the exchanges, if you wish to attain cultural success on your own terms, if you wish to trail-blaze, if you wish to live in a way that up-lifts the next generation of girls. Then, the inevitable successful future, when you, who worked so hard all your life, become condemned by the very generations you labored for. That is the last sacrifice women like Koharu Utatane must make.

As such, Sakura sees her as a mentor figure. One of the many women - alongside her mother, Tsunade, Shizune, Chiyo, Suzume, Anko, Kurenai, and recently Tsume - who guided her, opened paths for her.

However, Koharu was complicit in the Uchiha Massacre. After the post-war hearing, this is what she is most known for. She essentially killed the family of the man Sakura loves. A permanent villainy of the worst kind: inaction.

How do you both hate and admire one person? How do you allow yourself to be inspired by the same person that disgusts you? Is it a form of treason, against him, for Sakura to consider Koharu Utatane a mentor figure? Or is that simply the complexity of life, of living in a world where genocidists and warlords can be revered as heroes?

The Third Hokage was just as complicit. Yet, his face still gazes out from the Monument. In times of confusion, strife, worry, The Sixth stares at his predecessors' paintings, framed and adorned in the Hokage's office. The Fifth did the same thing. So will the Seventh. They stare and will stare at a painting of the Third, who allowed the Uchiha Clan to be exterminated, who gave the final order. Sakura still respects him for creating the Medical Corps, bringing healers into field combat during the Second War. How many lives did that decision save? If not for the Third, Sakura herself would hardly be a shinobi. But, isn't that a curse, to be a shinobi?

Her phone buzzes against her ribcage.

She ignores it. It's too cold out to to unzip her coat.

Exhaling, she keeps walking, down the long slow paved hill, towards the big green arch leading into the Utatane District.

— — —

"That song is stuck in my head," Ino says, scratching her elbow, taking her drink back from Sai. He smiles, wan and ceramic. The bar is damp, hot with people, sweat, flushed faces. Electrodisasterpop music reverberates in the pool table.

"Which one?"

"That one by - um - by Lulu! I can't remember the name, though."

"Wait," Tenten says, holding her palm up like a stop sign, something imperious settling into her acorn eyes, "Is that the one that, like, glorifies sexual molestation of teenage girls, or something?"

"What? Fuck no, what? No."

"Yeah. The lyrics, right? Um - _from crayons to perfume_?"

"Ah shit."

"That's kinda messed up, you know? From _crayons_? That's like real early Academy shit. I don't know about you guys, but we stopped with crayons in, what, 2nd year?"

"…Yeah."

"Did I just ruin that song for you?"

Ino gives her the finger, laughs, drinks. Somewhere outside the bar, a dog barks. Above the pool table, the amber lamp tilts. Sai rubs her back; she presses into his fingers. Smirking, Tenten picks her beer back up, swirling it around, staring into the foam and the backwash.

"It's fine 'cause I bought them beers…"

"What's that, Kiba?"

He shoots, misses.

"Nothing," he says, swearing, handing the cue over. Tenten finishes her beer, sets it down on the rim of the table, and begins prowling, scouring the board for a shot. Blue streaks of chalk. Torn green velvet. Balls gleam under the lamp-light, as if in anticipation, as if proud of her. She feels like a hyena tracking prey.

Slumping onto a stool, Kiba stares at his beer - dark brown coca, almost like coffee - frowning.

"Is it 'cause you yelled at Naruto?"

"How did you - did you read my mind?"

"First of all Kiba, I read the _situation_ , like a normal person," Ino says, unfolding her arms, placing her hands on her hips, "And, also, you have a particularly _noisy_ mind. So, don't even get all hot about that. And, I can't help it when I'm drunk."

"Dude-"

"Secondly," she says, a strange light gleaming in her eyes, "We've _all_ yelled at Naruto, Kiba. He's like - he's someone people yell at, you know? All the dumb shit he used to do. _Still_ does. Gotta keep his ego in tract, anyway. In tract? In tract. Yeah. In tract."

"Ino-"

"Sai called his dick small, once."

Biting down on his lower lip, Kiba tries not to smile. Then, the dam breaks; he laughs like a wheezing, wounded hound. Chalking the cue, Tenten dimples into her knuckles. Sai blinks, sips.

"See, Kiba," Ino says, folding her arms, tossing her head back.

Over the sound system, the song changes to something new, a back track from an EP released on Wednesday. An anthem called Pop and Circumstance by a band called The Widower's Widow, a local punk group consisting of three drummers, each playing a a distinct set - one for cymbals, one for drums, one for percussion - with a flautist using Fuuton to make his flute scream, all led by a woman who sings like a python and plays a big, black bass several times taller than her.

"All good things are loud," someone in the bar shouts. People cheer. People dance. Faces red, lips swollen, drinks spilling. Shaking their fists, stamping their boots, sweating. Nobody knows the words yet, the song is so new, but the music inhabits them like genjutsu, turning the crowd ravenous, euphoric. Ino's pupils dilate; she turns away, swaying, sipping her drink. Sai taps his foot on the floorboards. Kiba surveys the bar, the scene, the change in tempo.

"So," he starts, hesitating.

"Hmm?"

"You saw it? His dick?"

"I did, yes."

"What was it like? Was it small?"

Sai just smiles, tilting his head like a cat.

Howling with laughter, Ino drapes her arms around his neck, holding her cocktail between shoulder-blades. Bending over, Tenten prepares to shoot; she pulls the stick back, like cocking a rifle, then pulls it back again, then once more.

"Shino's got a big dick," Kiba says over the crowd, the music, lifting the beer to his nose, scowling at the smell - ash, sediment, damp wood-chips and all the hops.

Looking up from her shot, Tenten grins like a corkscrew, "Did you say he got a _bug_ dick? Eh? Eh?"

Switching from scowl to smirk, Kiba shakes his head, finishes his beer, adam's apple sliding up and down the lever of his throat like a 'test your strength' carnival game. He feels like a cartoon of himself. Like he is just living his life in pre-drawn animation, flipping through the pages, watching his body move.

"I'm getting another," he says, licking his lips, slobbering, "Anybody want one?"

Tenten raises her hand, like in school. Ino laughs, extricating herself from Sai, peering into her cocktail, twirling the straw around.

"Not yet," she says, almost to herself. Sai watches her, stiff as a board of plywood, like a mannequin, smiling, unblinking. Kiba recalls being a kid, going to a shop once that had mannequins, getting an erection from staring at the figures too long.

He blinks, sniffs, scowls.

"Aight," Kiba says, realizing, almost casually, how insane they all are. A freak show of a friend group. The Konoha Eleven. Rock Lee with his ridiculous training regimens, his hair and eyebrows, his spandex. Tenten with her love of tsukkomi, her ninja tools nerdistry. Hinata with her hidden cruelty, her unnoticed frankness, her desire to be a housewife. Shino with his forgetability, the hive of his body, the shadowed ernestness. Shikamaru with his unnatural genius, the way he sits like a crow when playing Shogi, the way he picked up a cigarette habit on purpose. Choji with his proud gluttony, his almost irritable kindness, his premature balding. Ino with her pseudo-automatic telepathy, her sudden fame as a one-time model, her unlauded skills as a true shinobi killer. Sai with his eunuch personality, his bluntness, his old-fashioned artistry. Sakura with her unremarked prodigious medical skills, her always fluctuating self-esteem, her indecision. Naruto when he mutters aloud and in public to Kurama, or to Nature, or to his dead parents, and his unlimited compassion, his unlimited power. Then, there is Kiba. Kiba with his facial tattoos, his dog eyes, his canines, his body smells and his overly-indulgent ambitions.

The line between destined for greatness and destined for burn out is fading. All of them stand on precipices, looking down, looking up, looking forward.

Kiba blinks, snarls, laughs.

"Thanks, buddy," Tenten says, handing him her empty glass. Giving her a thumbs up, he departs, nudging Sai's shoulder on the way out, ignoring Ino's probing mind. Turning his back on them, something rotating in his gut, he ambles away from the light of the pool table, into the crowd of dancers, holding the empty glasses high so they don't smash.

All these moving people. This compact space. Their bodies pressing against one another, rubbing, jumping, maneuvering - everything happening is sex. They all smell like pheromones. Like sweat and liquor and smoke. He pushes through their colony of lust, their mating season, their humping and grinding and trading partners.

The back of someone's hand hits his nose.

The war memories flicker, darken.

 _He is underground. In the tunnels. Water running through the rock-beds sounds like widows playing out-of-tune violins. Glowing mushrooms grow along the cavern walls, illuminating the caves in a diseased wan light. He smells minerals, heavy metals, their distinctive atomic densities and structures. Stalagmites and stalactites look like overgrown canines, gnawing at the damp weighted air._

 _He could never remember which was which. One points down; one points up. It never mattered to him, but his new teammates liked to tease. Teasing was treated as a necessity, bridging the divides between nations. Teasing made the fear abate. Teasing let them breathe without choking; teasing let them care for one another. If you can tease someone, if you can make someone laugh, if you can let someone laugh at you, you can save each-others lives._

 _They all die in the tunnels. Snatched by the Zetsu. Dragged into the deeper caverns, into holes, crevices and crags, into underwater coves. Their echoing screams disappear before their scents. Sound travels; scent does not. Scent stays in one place. Scent is unmoving, immutable, infallible. Their scents stick to his memories, even as their names, faces and voices fade. Their scents will grow like neon-green moss covering the rock of his brain._

 _Yoshigoro Em, a ninja from Kiri specializing in radio technology, smells like mercury, copper, rubber and saltwater. She dies first after getting separated from the group, dragged down into a pit. Kiba finds her nose later on. Then her left hand. Then the fingers of her left hand. He follows the trail of her scent until he discovers her radio-pack sitting up-right in the middle of a cavern. It is unbroken, without signal, the antennae sticking up like a kid's walkie-talkie, her rations tucked away in the pockets. He leaves it there, giving up the search, not wanting to risk setting off a trap._

 _Her brother, Yoshigoro Ken, smells like cotton, mud, and freshwater. He likes to mix doton with swordsmanship. When the tunnel caves in, while retreating to the entrance, Kiba thinks maybe he survived. While performing the signs for Earth Mud Release, he catches the stench of shit. Kiba does not bother disturbing the rock-beds to extricate him. He doesn't want to risk another collapse._

 _The three remaining shinobi trek deeper into the caverns, searching for another way out. They decide to rely on Kiba, asking him to sniff out an exit. Kiba was often on tunnel duty. His nose was good. He had the third best nose in the Alliance, they said. They claimed he could even smell carbon monoxide. If he went on the search expeditions, they didn't need to send down katon users or parakeet summoners. All their praise felt like cowardice, claustrophobia._

 _The Zetsu wait until they're almost free, until they found a way out. A bright rectangle of light, hovering above them. Wind gushing in from the outside, smelling like leaves, pine and lakes. Kiba will remember laughing, his voice echoing through the tunnels._

 _Then, they disappear, his two remaining teammates. Stark white arms reaching out from the cavern walls, grabbing them, pulling them in, dragging them back down into the caves, leaving Kiba there near the exit. He hesitates, shakes his head._

" _Shinobi are those who endure," Kiba mutters, scowling, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, swallowing a red food pill._

 _Time loses meaning underground. He will not recall how long he searched until he caught her scent. Amaro Rurui, a taijutsu expert from Kumo, smells like the goat droppings and the matted wet fur of her summons._

 _As he follows the aromatic trail, he smells no Zetsu, but sometimes she sees them. Lime-yellow watching through the rock-beds. Hints of white crossing against the darkness. Their soundlessness bares a certain solidity, too, a weight, a pressure._

 _Kiba finds Amaro and her summons in a wide open chamber. Hooves, limbs. Ribs and spines and knee-caps. Fur and hair and skin, clumped with blood. Genitals, hearts. Torn clothing, ninja tools, scrolls and shuriken and ration packages. Half-eaten organs scattered about the floors. Livers and lungs and stomachs, bitten into, chewed, spit out. Intestines strung up along the stalagmites like adornments, like ribbons and red drapery. Her forehead protector, marked with the symbol of the Alliance, gleaming under the sour light of glowing mushrooms._

 _In the center of the chamber stands three pikes with heads staring out at him. Mountain goats with their black-tipped horns, their spongy fleshy noses, their blood-soaked fur. The third is Amaro's. Her jaw ripped open, like a snake attempting to devour. Her jaundiced eyes unlit, crossed. Her spiky auburn hair dangling like knotted red string._

 _Kiba vomits, then he smells them. The Zetsu. White tar. Formaldehyde. Moss. Inside the beds of rock, water rushes, rising louder, whining, as if from the middle of his mind. Pulling a kunai from his pack, baring his sharpened teeth, Kiba snarls into the corners of the chamber where the fungi light does not reach._

 _Rada of the Oasis is the last to die. He was considered Sunagakure's finest suiton master. He smells like cacti juice. After rising from muddy puddles in the floor, taking form, he shouts out, "They can't replicate our Jutsu!"_

 _Getsuga tears through Rada's body like straw._

 _Skidding to a stop on the other side of the chamber, Kiba whirls around, cursing his enemy, insulting his enemy, wiping blood from his mouth. His curses and insults echo out of existence. He waits._

 _When the cleaved shape of Rada's corpse does not change back into a Zetsu, Kiba collapses to his knees amidst the chunks of guts, the splintered chips of bone, staring at his own darkened reflection in the blood._

" _I'll kill all of you bastards," he mutters, but they do not appear. Their stench is gone like a dissipated mirage, like a genjutsu broken._

 _He will never remember anything that happens after. Team Eight will track him down, led by Akamaru. The mission report, written up by Shino, will describe how they find him: Lying on his back in the puddles of smeared blood and guts, staring up at the stalactites, sticking his tongue out as if trying to catch a snowflake, t _he cavern walls marked with blood, hieroglyphic cave paintings, columns and rows of strange symbols, like an ancient alphabet, visages of the rabbit goddess and the blooming chakra tree, three human-shapes descending from an swirling eye above the Earth.__

 _When Kiba eventually finally leaves the cave, squinting at all the sunlight, the order will be received: "Begin marching to the Land of Rivers. Participate in the final battle; finish the war. Do everything you can to support Uzumaki Naruto."_

"Hello?"

"What?"

Kiba blinks. He's handing the empty glasses to the bartender but won't let go.

"Sorry," he says, letting go. The bartender lingers a glance on him, taking in his strange face, the red clan tattoos, the beast-like eyes, the fangs. Kiba sees himself reflected in the bartender's glasses. His face is gone. He blinks. The reflection is gone.

"No problem," the bartender mutters, setting the empty glasses behind the bar, running a hand through his black, shovel-head of a beard.

"Two more, please," Kiba says, raising his fingers like a lazy salute. He pauses, wondering if that was blasphemous somehow, if he just desecrated the memories of people he knew.

"Of what?"

"Of - Black Earth. Two Black Earths."

"Sure thing."

"And, a shot of Will of Fire," he says, as if snatching the extra drink with a net, holding gaze with his knuckles rested on the bar-top. They look like helmets.

"Oke-doke."

"Do you smell smokes?"

Looking him up and down, the bartender adjusts his glasses, creases appearing in his forehead as he frowns, "I thought the Inuzuka were renown for their noses."

"Uh. Yeah. Yeah. Nevermind."

"Two Black Earths and one Will of Fire coming right up."

"A shot."

"Yes. One shot of Will of Fire. Lots of ofs, you know?"

Smirking, Kiba gives a little laugh. He feels moral. The bartender floats away down the bar, doing his magic, his routine, his carnival show. All fluidity and style, grace and lubrication, and always a bored look on his face. That's the best part. You have to look bored when you move with such speed, strike with such wit, and rake in all your tips.

Kiba blinks.

Turning his back to the bar, he fumbles in his pockets for the nasal-dropper. All the people here smell like shit. All these citizens. A vile word. An insult, almost. It's fun to do that, to call his friends citizens. They always laugh. He almost laughs, too, then the stenches emerge.

He smells everything about everyone. Each week of each person here. The people gain dimensions, histories, vulnerabilities. All the sex they're having or not having. Liquors they drank tonight, what they smoked tonight and for the last several nights. Illnesses in the room. Allergies. Deficiencies, nutritional or otherwise. Camplbacter in a young woman's coronary. If she hadn't taken ammonium, she'd be shitting blood. Paper bombs rolled up in someone's back pocket. Kiba almost makes a move, but they're diffused. At the edge of the crowd, not dancing just swaying, a local hoodrat smells like Kurenai. Her dealer, maybe? A fling? A random stranger she happened to pass in the street?

Chortling, Kiba looks away, looks back, looks away again.

On the other side of the crowd, at the chairless tables near the windows, a purple-shirted man towers over a small green-haired woman with glazed eyes. She's smiling at him in wonder. He smells like black cologne, and crushed food pills, and clementine juice. The woman smells like food pills, too, and semen, and tequila. She's tapping her thumb against the table-top. Her pupils are thick and black, dilated. They're laughing, together. When he laughs, he doesn't break eye contact. He only laughs with his mouth and the creases around his lips. His teeth are straight and broad and white, almost shining. His eyes are dark and secretive. Kiba doesn't smell any condoms in his pockets.

He blinks, scans the crowd.

A few stools down sits a man in a tight t-shirt with a scar running down his face. He smells like a citizen. Shinobi smell like chakra, which usually smells like lighter fluid or sulphur, unless the shinobi is healthy, in which case their chakra usually smells like fruit, the flavor of which depends on the genetics. This man smells like clean laundry, and his sweat smells like fructose. He's been drinking too many sodas.

Kiba blinks, wipes his nose.

The front door swings open; a cold wind blows; the crowd gasps and laughs and dances harder. In the breeze, he smells Hinata, Naruto, and Sakura outside, along with the Utatane District itself: cigarettes, marijuana, vomit and liquor and the winter smells.

Sakura's scents are the most complex. Diseases, but not her own. Food pills. Blood and other body fluids. The hospital smells, as he calls them. Each time he goes to the hospital, everything smells the same. All the illnesses and wounds, the insides of bodies, the aroma of rotting things, all smashed flat underneath sterility and soap and a motley assortment of chemicals and serums and plastics.

Naruto smells like toads and the Uzumaki Corridor, which smells like trash and alleyways. His chakra is distinctive, almost iconic. Mixture of nature energy, which does not have a scent; his own personal chakra, which smells like acres of overripe fruits; and the Nine-Tails, which smells like hellfire. Kiba rarely finds a scent that viscerally frightens him. The white tar of the Zetsu. His mother's scent, too. Kurama's scent - apparently, Naruto and the demon are on first name basis, now, Kiba scoffs - cleaves him down the middle. There is something ancient and grudged inside of Naruto. That thing has a thousand years of aroma accompanying its chakra. In nature, when a powerful predator enters the forest, the deer and birds and rabbits flee.

Kiba closes his eyes, squeezing until he sees white spots.

Naruto smells like Hinata, nowadays, too, and vice-versa. They smell like cherry and soap. Her chakra smells like clementines. Her body smells like the koi ponds on the Hyuuga Estate. She always smells good. Even on long missions, when they were kids, tracking bandits or missing citizens across the countryside. All those nights in tents. She always smelled good. Now, she also smells like Kurama.

Grasping the nasal-dropper in his pocket, Kiba pulls it out and holds it up to his nostril - ginger, ethanol - and snorts. First the right, then the left. It hurts; then, the world is at peace. There is no such thing as scent. All the people here, in the bar and outside, take their secrets back, their weeks and personal histories. Hinata smells like nothing now.

"What was that?"

Turning around, Kiba sees the drinks first. The shot, like a rook on a chess-board. Two beers, glistening, foaming. The bartender stares from behind his beard, glasses gleaming with distrust.

"It's a thing we do. Inuzuka Clan."

"Huh."

"There's a lot of smells out there. Sometimes, we need to turn it off, you know, to give ourselves a break."

"You are not allowed to take illegal substances in here," he says, folding his arms, pursing his lower lip, "Do it out back."

"It's not illegal. It doesn't impair judgement, or anything, anything like that. Just - relief," Kiba says, staring at the drinks, yellow bar light curling and uncurling in the glasses, "We invoked Clan Rights Law, or whatever, when that - uh - bill passed."

"Clan Protection Act, yeah, sure," the bartender says, his voice granule like a driveway, "Just keep it in your pocket. Don't do it in my bar. Sheep's is the only respectable bar in the District. We're serious about that."

"Fair enough," Kiba says, dropping gaze back to the beers, the shot, his stomach turning, his body becoming heavy with anticipation.

Clearing his throat, the bartender adjusts his glasses.

"Twelve bucks for the drinks."

"Four each?"

"No. Twelve total. We're good to veterans here," he says, forcing eye contact; Kiba looks away, gritting his jaw; smiling like a splintered wooden beam, the bartender says, "Thank you for your service."

Pulling out his wallet, shaped like Pakkun, Kiba hesitates. He's barely twenty. He's a veteran. The veterans form before, they always seemed older than the adults. His mother is a veteran of the Third War. One of his uncles died in that war. His sister is just old enough to remember the funeral. Now, they're both veterans of the Fourth. But he was just a boy when it happened. A teenager. Not even drinking age. He had no real rights, yet. He could not vote on anything. He could not choose to leave the village. Some sick part of him respects Sasuke for that. The rest is still blurry, muddy, wrestling with itself. What happens when a shinobi stops being a shinobi, when they leave, when the orders from above stop coming? Without that routine, without that strict expectation of excellence, what happens? It's too scary to think about. Like being swallowed alive by a whale. Or a premonition of being swallowed alive. All that gaping, wet darkness.

"Is that a Pakkun wallet? I've been looking for one," the bartenders say, leaning forward, peering into the mouth of the wallet, flickering a frown, "My kid niece wants one. She loves that dog."

"Yeah. Yeah. Pakkun's a good dude."

"You know him?"

"We've met."

"Wow. Hey, you know, I've seen you around here before," he says; Kiba blinks; the bartender stands upright, "You get me a paw-print, you know, an autograph, and I'll give you and your friends free drinks for a night. When you bring it in."

"Sure thing. Thanks."

"Hey, no, thank you. Seriously. She's gonna freak."

Handing over the money, Kiba chuckles, genially bitter. It's what they expect from shinobi. That bitter fighting humor, to the end.

"And thanks for, you know, for bringing Uzumaki Naruto in here, tonight. Great advertising, you know," he laughs, stroking his beard, setting the money down behind the bar, "Have a good night, sir."

"You too," Kiba says, picking up the shot, staring at it's contents. In the light of the bar, the liquor seems to glow. Lifting it to his lips, he sniffs. It smells like nothing.

— — —

Passing underneath, Sakura stops in the enclosure, hitching her satchel higher up on her shoulder, making herself smaller as a cold wind blows through the archway, all the frost and snow kicking around the air like dust. Her parka feels like a second body, an extension of her narrow, bony frame. Scarf tight around her throat. Fingerless, pink mittens. Leaning against the wooden wall of the gate, wishing she had a cigarette between her knuckles just to look good, Sakura exhales.

This is the old front entrance to the Chunin Exams Stadium. A tall mossy arch with flared tips, known now as the Kahyo Arch, named for a Leaf kunoichi who was brutalized and killed during an exam many years ago. This is one of the few structures still remaining from Sakura's childhood, still holding the aesthetics she remembers, still baring resemblance to the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

Everything else is modernized, re-built. Everything else is urban and sudden, almost even rude within newness. The City of Konoha, some people say.

She scoffs, running her finger-tips across the chipped, dark green paint.

This was the gate for onlookers. Nobles, retired ninja and citizens who came to see the show: children swinging blades and blowing fireballs at each-other, showcasing their clan jutsus for the wealthy and ranked like little gladiators. Past this gate lies a history of bloodshed, echoing celebrations of brutality. Passing underneath once meant adhering to Warring States standards of child soldiership and the sport of violence.

Now, it precludes an unspoken, sometimes unnoticed, pact with yourself. When you enter the Utatane District, you agree to certain things: revelry, lechery, and spontaneity. Festivals beyond the Kahyo Arch have always been depraved, but now it is a relatively bloodless depravity. That is better, no matter what thickened feelings of nostalgia pass through Sakura's body as she waits in the archway for the winds to settle.

During the Incident, the not yet named Kahyo Arch survived but the stadium was crushed into rubble. Flattened by the sheer power of the Six Paths, the mythical summoned beasts and the subsequent rampage of the Nine-Tails.

When Konoha was re-built, the city planners wanted everything to be the same. To a degree, they succeeded. The Hokage's Mansion looks nearly identical. Naruto's apartment was, somehow, re-created. The Graveyard of Heroes was preserved. Over the months preceding the war, progress was steady.

Then, the Zetsu appeared, crawling through alleyways, unfinished houses, the open streets. Several Edos rose from coffins at the main road out of town: The White Fang, Senju Toka, Shimura Danzo, and Aburame Shikuro. Elders, disabled and retired shinobi fought viciously, alongside unmasked Foundation agents, while the Genin evacuated citizens into the Nara and Aburame forests. In the end, the Edos crumbled like papier-mâché, disappearing into pillars of white light. Rumor has it that Team Taka defeated the last of the Zetsu.

Despite victory, much of what had been built was once more destroyed. Konoha returned, again, to near-zero.

After the war, it was decided things would be different. The Ninja World, and the world in general, was entering a new phase, a new era, a time of alliance and supposed peace. Foreign city planners were brought it. Architects with university degrees. Zoning specialists. Politicians from the Fire Capitol. Business leaders with wealth, resources, and expertise. Councils were formed. Debates were had. Papers were signed. Most of the planning processes went unnoticed by shinobi who, during the time after the war, were busy with court hearing and tribunals and all their secrets being exposed to the general public. All the wars ninety percent of the population never knew about. All the betrayals, extortions, kidnappings, and assassinations.

Shinobi were not trusted re-build the Hidden Leaf.

As such, the Chunin Exams Stadium was placed near the outskirts of town, with the intent that Konoha would become a city, so as to make room for hotels, restaurants, and shopping centers without any zoning issues or having to push too many clans off their land. The latter intent was not a success.

Meanwhile, the old location of the stadium was empty, unpaved, and overgrown. A plot of land with a chain-link fence surrounding it. Signs reading "no trespassing" and "for sale." Konoha was littered with areas like this. Old neighborhoods, districts and compounds once belonging to mostly extinct clans such as the Kato, the Gekko, and the Uchiha. Empty except rubble and abandoned houses.

Another decision was made. A grant was written. A funding request. A bill was passed and placed on the Hokage's desk. The Sixth signed off on it, hoping to both protect existing clans and increase wealth in the city. They called it the Homestead Act.

Claiming imminent domain, all the unused plots of land were divided into square blocks. Anyone was allowed to purchase a block, so long as they could match the asking price and submitted the forms first. It was treated like a race, with advertisement and build-up, with a date the doors would open.

Lines formed instantly outside the Hokage's Mansion. People camped in tents in the street. Wealthy folks paid their employees to wait for them, while individual clans, such as the Uzuki, gathered funds on their own or asked for help from the Noble Clans whose land was never at risk.

Naturally, the entrepreneur who wrote the grant - a recently discharged Chunin named Kamminaron - had already prepared for the popularity of the Homestead Act. He was first in line. He walked into the Sixth's office with a checkbook primed, written.

He bought everything at once.

The city was his, instantly. It had never occurred to Kakashi to place a limit on how much land one person could purchase. Shinobi may be intelligent, cunning and cut-throat, but they have never been capitalists. Even the Hyuuga did not expect such an abuse of the system.

Much of the land was sold within the week, at higher cost, to various allies and friends of Kamminaron, such as the Daimyo, the owner of the Fire Iron Mines, the owner of the Mangrove Corporation, and the Akimichi Clan, all of whom have since contributed to Konoha's economic, industrialized boon.

Within the year, the Utatane District was born. Streets were paved. Bars and restaurants and corner-stores were built. Kamminaron owns all of them, competing with himself. He named the district to appease the growing kunoichi rights movement that originally opposed the Act. He named the Kahyo Arch for the same reason. Toka Avenue, too. Same with the Uzumaki Mito Homeless Shelter and the Sarutobi Biwako Registration Office where small business owners go to bid on space.

Along with the Utatane District, Kamminaron created the Uzumaki Corridor, where refugees and immigrants are housed during the citizenship arbitration process; Senju Park, which is known already as one of the Fire Country's most sought-after tourist destinations, several acres of lush, designed nature rumored falsely to be grown from sheer natural energy; Myoboku Center, a multi-plex shopping mall still in construction, named as thanks to the Toads for their continued loyalty to Konoha and the Alliance; and the Monument of Unity, a marble tower erected in the former Uchiha District to memorialize the Fourth War, its survivors, its causalities, and everything learned from the conflict and the Infinite Tsukoyomi.

These new centers and districts had once belong to clans.

The Homestead Act was meant to protect clans that owned land. However, the Sixth did not expect the imminent domain clause to be used with such ferocity. How does a person define what is considered "utility?" Is a forest considered useful? Is a creek, a river, a stream, that is not being used for drinking water or fishing, considered to be useful?

The Nara were able to save their forest, claiming - not entirely without truth - that an evil spirit of death was sealed in the soil. The Yamanaka flower park, a massive sprawl of gardens, was defined as useful in an apothecary sense. Several other clans, too, saved their lands: the Namiashi foothills, where they mine black ore; the Umino ponds, where leeches are gathered to be used in medicinal ways; and the Yamashiro Clan's bird sanctuary was declared a nature reserve.

The Aburame, however, were less lucky. Perhaps because of their sullen, silent attitudes not jibing well with citizens. Perhaps because their bodies are strange and terrifying to non-shinobi. Perhaps because so many died in the war or perhaps because they have no real assets in the eyes of the feudal-capitalists. The difference may have been cultural. Sense of time-keeping, what is important, and manners differ greatly between the Aburame and the Fire Country's populace. Shino is one of the few remaining, since the war. His clan's ancient forest is scheduled for demolition this month, to make room for the new train line connecting Konoha to the Fire Capitol. They are one of two noble clans to lose their land.

This all happened before Sasuke left. He never tried to preserve the Uchiha District. For years, it was his labyrinth of shame and loneliness and orphanhood. He claimed no nostalgia, no sentiments. But Sakura knew better. They were together for a period of six months between the end of the war and the end of the war tribunals. Spring was lingering, when he left. Summer heat hadn't descended yet because the rains kept coming each weekend.

She remembers saying goodbye to him. Offering to go with him, knowing he would decline, but it felt rare and ostentatious to offer. As though she could or would give up her promising medical career for the sake of sex and passion. He smiled when she offered, like a seam in a plank of wood. She actually began to believe herself.

It pains her to admit - so, she rarely does - but she really did feel warm, cuddled almost, when he poked her forehead. It was better than kissing. Touch is a sensitive thing to Sasuke. Something that frightens him. Togetherness, unfiltered romance, interpersonal connection: he is like glass to these humanities due to his traumas, everything Orochimaru did to him, everything that happened with Itachi.

Maybe it was a genjutsu. A small, warm illusion. Like a parting gift for her. She wouldn't mind. He cannot offer much, being Sasuke, being the way he is. All his pain that, like Naruto's, always outweighs all of hers. In that way, she is stronger than them. She is strong enough to let them be the pained, tragic ones while she keeps working.

So, he left. The world was changing, both her own personal world and the world at large. She kept working. Saving lives. Curing diseases. Ending suffering.

As she got used to being alone again, the idea of the children's mental health ward was just a figment of ambition. At nights, on the weekends, at the bars, the concept would rotate in her thoughts like turning blades of a fan, gaining speed and traction, cutting through all the air and smoke.

One drunken night at a bar down the block from Ichiraku, called The Underground, back when all the girls still refused to go the Utatane District, she and Ino formulated their plans. Sakura would be the head doctor, Ino the head of therapy. They'd make use of the Yamanaka mind reading skills to help ease the PTSD of child soldiers. That was their goal. She'd been finding success with Sai, Ino said. Something burned in Sakura, imagining what Sasuke could be without his pain.

Then, development hell. For a year and several months, they found no investors. In the end, all it took was an offer. Kamminaron had sold the land, where the new hospital will be built, to the owner of the Mangrove Corporation, Horimoto. He always had a fondness for women. He claimed to be a feminist, citing as evidence his copious donations to Banshee, the local and newly-formed kunoichi rights group Sakura had joined only weeks prior.

So when he asked her to look down, and she saw what he'd pulled out, Sakura bit her tongue. _I just need you to watch_ , he said, almost begging. Sitting up straight in her chair, legs crossed, palms resting on her knee, she thought about all the child soldiers she would save.


	4. Chapter 4

"Shinobi are those who endure," Ino claims, setting her drink down, the amber liquid glowing under the lamp-light.

Tenten blinks, smirks.

"Is that a fact?"

The pool balls clack against one another, like a jigsaw puzzle coming undone. Nothing lands. Kiba scoffs, picking up his beer, sipping, glowering over the rim at the landscape of the table, all the remaining balls left gleaming like constellation in a sky of velvet green.

Laughing politely, Sai leans the cue stick against his narrow, black-clad frame. He picks up the chalk and applies it to the loose skin between his forefinger and thumb. Ino blinks, sensing the fluctuations in his mind, a certain competitiveness emerging, harkening back to his days in the Foundation when all the boys would bully each-other trying to get Danzo to praise them.

Ino frowns, her knuckles sharp against the glass of her drink.

"Wait," Tenten says, "Did you just read my mind?"

"Hmm? No! And, Naruto says it a lot - Shinobi are those who endure," Ino replies, picking the thin blue straw out of her drink, watching the whiskey drip like anesthetic from a needle, "And - I believe him."

Smiling like the curly tail of a pig, Tenten lifts up her beer, sets it back down, folds her hands.

"It's going to be our, like, our slogan," Ino continues, twisting the straw up between her fingers, "At the new hospital. It'll be painted in big letters on the facade, out front, I think. Is that what it's called? Facade? Facade? No. That's a different thing.

 _Promenade_ , Tenten thinks, leaning forward.

"Yes? I think so. I think that's right. Promenade. Yeah, promenade. Anyway, we want him to give the ribbon cutting ceremony speech thing. He'll say it in the speech - shinobi are those who endure - then gesture to the sign, or whatever."

Leaning back in her chair, Tenten sips her beer. It is a stout, according to the bartender, although she has no idea what that means.

"Everyone'll cheer," Ino says, simpering into her whiskey, "It'll be great."

"Shinobi are those who endure," Tenten repeats, smiling like a swing that won't fall back down. Her beer tastes like driftwood in a pale river. Something narrows in her mind. It reminds Ino of Temari's fan folding closed, the purple circles disappearing like consecutive prophecies.

"Yeah," she says, looking over her shoulder, watching Sai as he bends over to measure his shot, his thoughts all focus and direction, like migrating geese, the destination being the far corner pocket. Ino smiles, sipping her whiskey. It feels good how it burns her tongue. Scalding without heat. Pain without violence. It feels good, the way it incites her nerve endings, the way it loosens the heavily-knotted net of her mind.

"Why not just - shinobi endure?" Tenten asks, cracking her knuckles. First the right hand, then the left. Then, her neck. Then, her back, twisting her spine like a corkscrew.

"Sounds better, you know? It just sounds better. Shinobi endure. Sounds better."

"No, no," Ino replies, waving the idea away, "It needs to be 'Shinobi are those who endure.' Just like how Naruto says it. It won't work otherwise."

"Why does he say it like that?"

"Elegance, I guess. Eloquence. Eloquence. Elegant eloquence."

"Elephants with elegant eloquence," Tenten says, laughing, the drapes of her mind opening back up, letting the sunlight in. Ino hears clashing metal, something sour, and something warm and inebriated and warless.

"Yes," Ino responds, sucking on her whiskey, feeling old and professional and deliberate. Behind her, Kiba cackles - _teach you that in ANBU? -_ as Sai misses the cue ball entirely, like a joust gone haywire. Smiling like a clean porcelain bowl, he hands the stick over, folding closed and pocketing his immediate failure. Ino blinks, sips.

"It just sounds weird," Tenten says, swirling her beer around, watching the foam stretch and sway, "Like stumbling. It doesn't sound good. Shinobi endure; that sounds much better. That sounds like - it's forceful - you know? It's a command."

"It shouldn't be a _command_ , though. We're here to help people, not scare them off."

"Eh," she says, shrugging just one shoulder, sipping her beer. Ino shakes her head, cheeks flushed pink with liquor.

She blinks as Kiba smacks the cue ball like a destroyer. It careens across the table, finding every gap between balls, ricocheting against the other end, rolling to a stop back in front of him.

 _Damnit_ \- she hears him exclaim in his head, amidst a riot of self-insults and flashing war memories. She twists around to watch him handing the stick off. Picking his beer from the rim of the table, he drinks it almost violently.

"Shinobi are those who endure," she repeats, louder, with force, turning back to Tenten, "See, it sounds like, like something written on a stone tablet, you know? It sounds ordained. Or scholarly. And we don't wanna be forceful. Our hospital is going to be a place of peace. Calm. You know, for people who need help."

"All the journalists are going to evicerate you."

"That's now how you spell that."

"Huh?"

"Evicerate. That's not spelled right."

"I said it. I said it out loud."

"I heard you trying to spell it, in your thoughts. You didn't spell it right."

Tenten laughs, choking on her beer, "How do you spell it, then?"

"I don't know. Just not like that. Is it even a word? Evicerate? Is that even a word?"

"Dude, I don't know. You know what I meant, though."

"When the hell have state-sponsored journalists had _any_ power, anyway? Who cares? The Hokage's Office basically runs the news media, as it is, so who cares what some little staff writer has to say?"

They both laugh, clinking drinks.

Sai takes a shot without measuring, landing a ball; his mind brightens. Kiba growls, low and untamed, as if leashed to a chain-link fence, holding his beer against his sternum.

"Speaking of books," Tenten says, looking down under the table then coming back up, blushing slightly, "Nevermind. I forgot."

"What?"

"I don't carry a bag around. I forgot."

"You forgot? How do you forget something like that."

"It just happens."

"Were you going to show me a book?"

"Yeah," she says, watching Sai land another ball, watching Kiba react with purposeful belligerence, "Oh well."

"What've you been reading?"

"Well… Since you ask," she says, grinning; Ino chortles, sips, already knowing the answer, having read her thoughts, but playing along anyway; Tenten takes a sip before talking, "After I got ahold of those - um - ninja tool artifacts-"

"I'm pretty sure the Hidden Cloud never gave those to you."

"I didn't _steal_ anything, though. You do respect the law of finders keepers, right?"

"You're just a weapons nerd! Oh my god. That's what it is," she says, eyes shining, half-smiling, as if seeing her for the first time, "You're just a _nerd_. Wow."

"Be that as it may," Tenten responds, her mind exuding a certain pride in nerdism, "I did some research at the _local library_."

"I like how you emphasized that. Local _library_. _Local library_."

Tenten laughs. Sai finally misses a shot. Kiba, mind aglow with a carnal reddish haze, snatches the stick back and begins rushing around the table towards his shot. Somewhere in the bar, someone drops a glass, smashing it on the floor. The noise of everyone talking and thinking and dancing, and the music on the radio, swallows the moment whole, like a whale eating a plankton without noticing.

Ino closes her eyes, compartmentalizing all the noise, all the various minds, the riot of thoughts, emotions, reactions and intuitions.

"As it turns out," Tenten continues, laying her palms open on the table like a book, "Extensive histories have been written about these artifacts, the Bashosen, the Benihisago, and the other tools of the Sage of the Six Paths. People have been searching for them for _centuries_. Centuries, Ino. Ninjas had them most of the time, to be honest, although, for awhile, the Kingdom of Apes possessed the Shichiseiken, and then there was a long time when the Land of Wind, back when it was an empire, you know, had all five tools at once. But anyway, most of the time, ninja had the tools and have been researching them for centuries. Particularly the Benihisago and the Kokinjo has been of interest, given their strange powers. Anyway, extensive histories have been written. Including what - I guess we can call an encyclopedia, yeah - an encyclopedia of the trigger words - or soul words - of various shinobi, at the time of it being written. It's long, really. Long, long book. Most of the names I do not recognize. But each name accompanies their most used word or, like, their most _innate_ word. I've done some research, and I guess its not just your most _used_ word that works, that gets you sealed, you know, but also words that bare particularly strong meaning to you, you know? That makes sense, anyway. Language is such a powerful thing, obviously, so those that are inspired easily, or are moved by poetry, and stuff, might be more likely to fall trap to the Kokinjo and Benihisago. But anyway-"

"Sounds interesting," Ino says, admiring how Tenten's mind changed since she began talking about this, as if her thoughts are now brushstrokes, creating a watercolor of ambition, obsession, and playfulness. This is her favorite part of being a telepath, observing joy.

"Yeah! Right? Super shitting interesting! It was compiled in the Warring States Era, by the Yotsuki Clan, I guess, as a secret weapon, so to speak. You know, as a way to defeat their strongest enemies, both in the Land of Lightning and in the other Lands, too."

"Fascinating," Ino says as Kiba stops measuring his shot, relying instead on just luck, his thoughts softening when he makes that choice. He lands a ball, cheering himself on while his mind darkens further.

"It's super awesome, actually," Tenten continues, gesticulating wildly, her beer sitting forgotten on the table, "The First Hokage's word, at least when this was compiled, was - well, there are three options written down - just in case, I guess, because even our modern intelligence organizations can't just _know_ this information, maybe. But anyway, but the possibilities were _brothers_ , _unity_ , and _soup_."

"Soup? Really?"

Tenten nods, grinning, shrugging with her eyes. As Kiba lands a shot, he cheers himself on, barking madly, but his mind darkens, sharpens. Sai stands there next to him, straight and narrow like a street-lamp.

"Huh," Ino says, glancing over her back, "So, what about the Second?"

"Ninjutsu, vile, and vitriol!"

"Two v's, wow," Ino says, turning back around, "Hardcore."

"Totally. And, Uchiha Madara's were, at the time - he had four, written down, I guess - brothers, war, peace, and Hashirama."

"Hashirama?"

Tenten nods, giggling, picking her beer back up, taking a sip.

"Cute," Ino says, glancing back at the boys when Kiba misses a shot. His mind settles, content within failure, swearing audibly and forcefully while handing the stick back to Sai. Sipping her whiskey, she turns back around. Tenten's mind right now is a map of warm morning-light.

"There's more, too. Way more. So many damn names. One of Choji's ancestors is in there. Uzumaki Mito is in there, and her father, Ashina the Great Sealer of Demons. Um - Uchiha Izuna, who was Madara's brother. Kamizuru Ishikawa, who was the First Tsuchikage. A super famous summoner known as The Great Anchor, who would become the First Mizukage. Most of the First and Second Gokage are written in there, actually, along with some ancestors of super famous clans like the Ketsyu, the Karatachi, the - there's someone in here named Might Trai, too," she says, laughing, blushing, "Tons of names, really. Just tons of names. Lots of interesting words, though, though. War was in there a lot. Family. Money. Death. Brothers. Sisters. There were a lot of clan and family related words. All sorts."

"Cool," Ino replies, blinking as Sai makes a shot, but his mind does not brighten as usual. Instead, it stagnates, flat and disc-like, shimmering black.

"Any Yamanakas?" she asks while sending a thought to Sai, _"What's up?"_

" _Something is wrong with Kiba."_

" _I know."_

"Not that I saw," Tenten responds, looking at the ceiling, the rafters lit by orange sour bar-light, "But there was a Nara? Someone named Nara Shikara. I don't know who that is, though. Probably Shikamaru's grandfather, or something."

" _He seems to be broken up about something,"_ Sai responds. Ino blinks, looking into her drink for answers, seeing only the clinking ice and brown winking liquor.

"Shikara was his great-grandfather," she replies, smiling at Tenten, thinking to Sai, _"I bet its what he said earlier, to Naruto. He's such a bastard, sometimes. I don't know. He needs help."_

"Oh that's cool. Well, he had two words written down, here: deer and troublesome."

Ino laughs; her thoughts stutter; Sai misses his shot on accident; Kiba yowls with feigned delight.

" _Hello?"_

" _I'm here."_

" _What can we do?"_

" _I don't know,"_ Ino responds, shaking her head, looking at Tenten, "They never change, the Nara."

""Yeah! And, what I wanted to say - uhm," she responds, setting her beer down, placing her palms on the table-top, "I guess there was this writer who lived during the Founding Era - died just a couple decades ago, in fact - who wrote a whole children's story using just the words in this book."

" _Can you do for him what you did for me?"_

"Cool," Ino replies, smiling, _"Too kinky for me."_

" _No, no."_

Ino laughs _, "You're almost there with jokes_."

"Right?" Tenten responds, eyes brightening, "I was thinking someone should do that now, too, you know? Compile everyone's words and, like, write the modern, Konoha version of it. Or even the whole Alliance. It could be like a momento to the Alliance. Momento? Memento. Memento."

Missing his shot, Kiba barks like a rabid dog, handing the stick back to Sai who glances over at the girls, _"Well?"_

" _When we get the clinic up and running, we'll be able to get him professional help,"_ Ino thinks back, smiling at Tenten, and says, "Wait. So. You wanna be a writer?"

"Fuck no!"

" _How long will that be?"_

"But," Tenten says, raising her forefinger, "If you know anyone, lemme know."

" _I don't know,"_ Ino responds, then says, "Sure thing."

"Or, if Sai knows anyone. He's in the arts community, after all. Lemme know."

"We will. We'll look around."

" _I do know someone, in fact, who would love to write that book. Haruki?"_

" _Haruki would be perfect,"_ Ino responds, blinking, smiling, "We know someone - Haruki? Haruki would be perfect."

"Great! Introduce me when you can. Call me."

" _What about Kiba, Ino?"_

" _I don't know,"_ she responds, then says, "Yeah, of course. I'd give you their number, but they don't like phones. They say too much immediate satisfaction diminishes creativity, or something."

" _He's been like this for awhile, now. Since the war."_

"Haruki sounds awesome," Tenten says, tapping her thumb-nail on the rim of her beer, "But you're speaking weird, like he's two people at once."

"Sort of, yeah. Sort of is," Ino replies, smiling politely, _"Kiba was always a freak. But yeah. Yeah it's gotten worse since the war."_

" _You know him better than me."_

" _You're right. He needs help, now. Soon,"_ she responds, quietly sipping her drink. Over the speakers, the music changes. A song called Election of the Electrocutioner, by the band, Katon No Fathers. Two bass guitarists, fraternal twins, both gender fluid. One electric guitarist that just does his own thing with no sense of rhythm, pace or time. A keyboardist who plays with metal chopsticks. A drummer with a set full of cymbals shaped and colored like rice-picker hats. And a leader singer who plays a tambourine empowered by lightning chakra. They called themselves the 'new weird,' as stated recently in an interview showcased in the underground zine, _Jealous Husband_ , whose staff writers and editors publish basically anything they want so long as it relates in some way to their readership, the denizens of the Utatane District.

As the song changes, the bar dances, like eruption, like sudden inspiration. Music elevates, re-writes.

"Hey," Tenten says, loud enough to be heard, setting down her beer, "I heard Sai's going to be featured soon, in an exposé?"

"Yeah! Jealous Husband interviewed him last week," Ino replies, eyes bright and blue, "They're planning to plaster the city with copies of his prints the day of release."

" _Not copies. It will all be originals. Speaking of which, I need to work on that tomorrow. I have to draw up hundreds of rats,"_ Sai thinks, landing a shot in the side pocket. Kiba snarls with contrived contrition.

"Not copies," Ino says, correcting herself, smiling at Tenten, "Originals. All originals."

"Super cool! Hey, have you heard of this new shinobi painter? She has the same name as the Nine-Tails, actually. She was never trained in the Academy or anything, but has this innate aptitude for genjutsu."

" _I can help you after my meeting with Ibiki,"_ Ino responds, then says, "Yes. The Intel Squad has been keeping tabs on her. She's from the Kurama Clan, actually. They're pretty ancient and never joined a Hidden Village."

"Her landscapes are _gorgeous_ , though! Have you seen them?"

Ino shakes her head, sipping from her glass.

"What happens is she puts you in a genjutsu, and you get to actually walk through her painting! It's amazing. The worlds she creates are so lush and sunny and warm. It'd be a shame if Konoha stifled her creativity because of, well, technically I guess it is improper use of shinobi arts, but who cares!? It's a really amazing experience. So intimate and personal, too. You should tell Morino and Shinobu and all those intel geeks to back off of her, a little bit. She's talented."

"Well, it's Kido Tsumiki that wants us to investigate her. I think he wants to put her in the ANBU. Anyway, I don't really have much authority there, to be honest," Ino belies, sipping her drink as Sai misses his next shot on purpose. Kiba claps his hands, applauding himself, but inside he broils, snatching the cue back, brooding his way around the side of the table.

Ino sets her drink down.

" _Be careful with Kiba, Sai."_

" _What should I do?"_

" _Just keep playing pool with him, or something. Don't let him win. He doesn't want to win. And he'd hate it if his rivals went easy on him. He still has that kind of self-respect."_

" _Right. Of course."_

" _Thanks."_

Through their shared thoughts, Sai winks at her. Ino laughs. Tenten raises an eyebrow.

"What?"

"Huh? Sorry. It's nothing. Just remembered something funny. Hey, but yeah, there's plenty of great shinobi artists coming up nowadays, ever since the Alliance. I guess there's more room for art, now that voices aren't so lost to war and things. Have you heard about that guy from Takigakure?"

Tenten shakes her head, sipping her beer. It's almost empty.

"Well, basically, he creates waterfalls. He uses suiton and doton to create these, like, self-sustaining water cycles, waterfalls, and he places them in places you would never expect. Like, most recently, we got wind of one appearing in an empty warehouse in the Hidden Rain."

"What? Why?"

"Well, I think that, I think that he chose some random warehouse, an abandoned place like that, obscure, because the audience would be so small. And nobody would expect to see that there. Like, they'd start by just hearing the noise of the water, which would already be strange in the middle of a city like the Rain. You know, 'cause of the drought."

"Ever since Akatsuki lost control, before the war."

"Yeah. Anyway. So that'd already be weird, or even hopeful, now, to hear the sound of falling water. Then, they'd walk in and see a waterfall amidst all that gray, empty space. All the metal and concrete and whatever. There's just a waterfall there, somehow. The surprise of it was meant to inspire people, I think."

"Huh."

"Yeah. And, I guess people have been finding these all over the Ninja Continent, lately. It started in the Rain, but rumor has it the guy's name is Nobuhiro Karara, a retired Chunin from Takigakure that emigrated to the Rain after the war. But, people've been finding these waterfalls in the Land of Fire, too, recently. There was one that appeared in the middle of Fun-Fun Avenue, actually, in that disgusting city past the forest."

"It appeared?"

"Yeah. I guess he built it during the day when everybody was asleep," Ino says, laughing into her drink. Grinning, Tenten shakes her head.

"Sounds interesting," she says, sipping the last dredges of her beer, tipping the glass almost 180 degrees. Ino watches, smirking, chin resting on her palm, listening to the pool balls clacking behind her and the thoughts of people in the bar becoming a haze, a layer of noise she must dwell inside of like a fine mist.

"Yeah," she says, setting her hand down on the table, pushing her thumbnail into the wood, "Yeah. He says - Kurarara - he says he wants to inspire people with natural beauty. Huge fan of Naruto, actually, by the way. Um, and that the shock of seeing a waterfall somewhere strange is supposed to, like, initiate something in the brain. I don't know, really. I mean, I'm a psychiatrist, basically, at this point, I know all sorts of things about brains. Konoha has the most up to date knowledge on the human brain of any of the Five Major Nations… But I don't know. There's a lot we don't know yet. The human brain, or all brains I guess, is like an uncharted land. We haven't explored most of it yet. There's so much to be discovered. In history, people from my clan and others have ventured pretty deep into the mind, but nobodies ever gone all the way in. Maybe Kurarara is right."

" _You went pretty far with me,"_ Sai thinks to her, measuring his next shot.

Ino smiles, picking up her drink.

"And," Tenten says, twirling her empty beer glass on the table, "Every brain is different, right?"

Ino nods and shakes her head at the same time. Tenten chuckles. Ino centers herself.

"The biology is pretty much the same. Our phylogenic history is a shared thing. Our creation is shared. We all come from the same place, in the end, if you go back far enough, and the human body has only changed drastically once since then."

"Once? Are you talking about when Kaguya came to Earth?"

Ino nods, "Yeah. We didn't have chakra systems, back then, you know? There was nature energy, but only a handful of humans in history have been able to harness that like the Animals can. I don't know. It would've been super interesting to be alive back then, when Kaguya brought chakra to Earth. I mean, the bodies of all humans changed! A whole new circulatory system, like, _grew_ inside of people. We still don't know how long that took. If it was over the course of generations, like - if original chakra was like radiation in the soil and water, bringing upon genetic changes over time… Or if it all happened at once, overnight. Maybe there was an Infinite Tsukoyomi and when we all woke up we had, essentially, new bodies. I don't know. We just don't know."

"Fascinating."

"Yeah," Ino says, finishing her whiskey, the ice clinking, half-melted at the bottom.

Behind them, Kiba lands a shot, igniting a conflicting series of emotions in his thoughts. Self-loathing and self-glory meeting in the middle like oil and water, moving around one another in a space too small for both. He slams down the cue stick, then laughs.

" _He shouldn't drink more,"_ Sai thinks; Ino blinks, _"That's not our call to make."_

"Hey, you know, that Kurararararara guy or whatever," Tenten says; Ino laughs; Tenten chuckles, "He reminds me of those 'guerrilla sculptors' of the Hidden Stone."

"What, like Deidara of the Akatsuki?"

"No. No, the Stone, not the Rock. In the Stone, there's this group of artists that go out at night, wearing old ANBU masks, I guess, using Doton and Limestone and Steel Release to create statues of shinobi who died as a result of inter-village strife. Nobody even knows their names or who they are. All we know is one of them, at least one of them, can use the Liquid Steel Kekkai Tota, and that they must've spent some time training in Iwa because they know Limestone Release. Nobody knows how they got ANBU masks though."

"Wow," Ino says, recalling having heard of that from Ibiki.

"Yeah! They erected an Uchiha, actually! I think his name was Uchiha Setsuna, or something? A really old Uchiha, from back during the First War. He lead a failed coup against the Second Hokage. They made a statue of him, Setsuna, in an old Uchiha Clan hideout near the Earth-Rain border."

"Hmmm."

"Anyway, they made one of Pakura of the Scorch Release, too. That's how I first heard of them, you know, 'cause I remember how much damage she caused during the Sand-Sound Invasion, when we were Genin. They put up a statue of her in the Wind Capitol, actually. Right next to one of those re-furbished aqueducts, I guess."

"She killed one of my cousins," Ino remarks, chuckling.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I never heard of that. Who was it?"

"Sanra. Santa's little brother. He was just a few years older than me. We used to train together."

" _Ino. Stop lying. Danzo simply simply ordered him to fake his own death, out of fear that the Intel Squad would probe his mind."_

"That's too bad, Ino. I'm sorry to hear that. I'm sure he was a good man."

" _I know. But, officially, Sanra died then,"_ Ino replies, then looks up, smiling with closed eyes, "He was. It was a long time ago. We all lost people in that conflict and in the conflicts since then."

" _Shinobi don't need to lie anymore."_

" _Yes we do."_

"They also put up statues of the Jinchuriki, too," Tenten says, pushing forward, "All nine of the most recent ones. The Kazekage. Killer Bee. Naruto. All of them."

"Really? Where? How do you even hear of these things?"

"I'm an arms dealer."

Ino blinks, cocking her head.

"Just a joke, a joke," Tenten says, waving her hand, but Ino can feel how her thoughts close up like a metal crate. Suddenly, she is pushed out of Tenten's head, left to drift amidst Kiba and the civilians, all their noise.

"So, where did they put up the Jinchuriki statues?"

"Oh! Uh, in a big row at the Land of Iron, right out the front gate of the Samurai HQ, where the Gokage Summits were held leading up to the war."

"Wow."

"Yeah. I guess the statues are all wearing these strange, white jumpsuits, with body armor. All of them scowling, arms folded, staring at the front gate."

"Huh."

"I'm glad! There's too much silence, still, about these things. Too many lies."

Ino stares at her, hands folded on the table.

"So many shinobi have died," Tenten continues, as if unable to stop, "Caught up in the middle of village politics. Disgusting. So many shinobi were betrayed by their own, on the orders of their superiors. The Foundation. The Bloody Mist. All the Suna ninja that the Fourth Kazekage sent to die against his son. The list goes on forever and forever. It's just sad."

"At least it makes good art," Ino mutters, staring at her knuckles.

"Yeah."

"I think strife results in art. You know?"

Tenten nods, slowly. Sai's mind spurs, as if inspired.

"We all have something to say," Ino continues, "Shinobi voices have been silenced for so many generations. And then, I don't know, it becomes hard to put into words how we feel, the depth of everything that's happened, so people like us, we resort to visual depictions, experiences, you know. We make statues and sculptures and murals and drawings. All the wretchedness inside of us, it has to come out somehow, and language is only so dimensional, I think, sometimes. So we send it out there in other ways, in any way we can… So many people are still illiterate, too."

"Shinobi, actually, have very high rates of literacy, though. It's part of why the public views us as privileged. We have had access to education in ways most people don't. Always for the sake of missions, of course. I mean, you know, you can't read messages, order, secret documents, whatever, if you, you know, _can't read_."

"Yes. But thats the point. How are we supposed to tell the people, the citizens, who we are if they cannot all read? So, we paint. We sculpt."

"And we speak," Tenten says, raising her chin, "You could say, argue, that Naruto's talk-no-jutsu is an art form, too. The art of speech. Performance. Charisma."

"Exactly," Ino says, clinking Tenten's empty glass with her own empty glass.

" _Shinobi are those who endure."_

"Shinobi are those who endure."

— — —

Ignoring her buzzing phone, she keeps walking downhill, following a line of red and blue lanterns leading her to Pub Row, the main strip of the District.

Crowds of scantily clad teenagers and twenty-somethings, most of them citizens, rove the streets and linger at alleyways and corners, smoking, flirting, drinking, dressed in black, in torn jeans, in tie-dyed hair and random piercings, like a mixture of mourners and punk.

Music plays from inside the bars. Frosty pub windows. Glimmering lights. Thumping bass and screaming electric guitars, muffled then released, muffled then released, as doors swing open then closed. Street-lamps seem to flicker in response, as if the power grid taps its foot in rhythm.

Every couple steps, she hears a cat-call, a whistle, sharp laughter, although unsure if these noises are directed at her.

How strange humans are, she thinks.

Birds dance for their mates. Male gorillas kill babies they didn't produce. Most living creatures just split down the middle, becoming two of itself. But humans, we whistle at each-other, and we make animal noises at each-other, and we seduce. We talk with silver tones, wear tight clothing and false scents, prowling around one another like jaguars.

Perhaps humans only seem strange when we think of ourselves as human. As if the wild can possibly be stolen from us. As if the tiny concentric knots of instinct can be extricated from our synapses. As a doctor, she knows we are made of chakra, genetic code, and we move because of enzymes. Yet, there is still something romantic about us. There is still something made of poetry, and rhythm, and studiousness.

Then we do we so often forgo romance for destruction?

Down the block, someone is singing. They sound like a creaking branch in winter. A wooden voice. Unprofessional, unrefined, but exuding a grut honesty.

 _i get lonesome when youre around_

 _i get lonesome when youre around_

 _but im_

 _never_

 _lonesome_

 _when im by myself_

Then, breaking laughter, the song fragmenting into giggles. She smiles, ignores it, and keeps walking venturing deeper down Pub Row, Sheep's emerging from the slope of bars and alleys.

Broken glass, cigarette butts, the aromas of various smokes. Someone tries to talk to her. A man wearing auburn leather. He has a broken nose. She hitches her bag higher, walking neither faster nor slower. He gives her the finger as she passes, talking unintelligibly.

She smiles, secretive and alone.

Something like ease settles in her. Knowing is better than not knowing. This place is inarticulate and unintelligent. She is better than this place; she is composed, deliberate and assured. She is laborious. If she works hard enough, they might name a street after her; they might carve her face into a bust and put it in a hallway in the hospital. Maybe even an entire wing. Or a mural somewhere could hold her image. A chapter in a textbook dedicated to her. A mention in a medical history course. That would be nice.

"Hey!"

Looking up, she sees waving hands, an orange parka, a white-brick wall full of graffiti and curling vines, Hinata and Naruto, grinning across the street.

She waves back, laughing.

They are made of light, it seems. Konoha's favorite couple. Appearing in the tabloids almost daily. Rumor has it their relationship is artificial, invented by the Hokage and the Council of Clan Heads in order to retain power through the medium of celebrity.

Sakura knows better.

Wiping her eyes, hoping they're not too dilated, she crosses the street. A rough wind blows. It's cold but good. Enlivening. Like adrenaline. Her sneakers do not slip on the ice. She feels strong and articulate.

"Hey," she says, exchanging hugs. The reality of them astounds her; they are so real, so existing, and they are somehow her friends. So, she delves right into the chatter, the volley of jokes and insults. Flurrying and snapping, easy and comfortable and usual. Old arguments feigned as pleasantries and banter. Heavy and warm memories bobbing beneath the surface of the ocean of their shared histories.

They are a trio, she realizes, unable to suppress her smile.

"How was work?"

"Good! I mean, hard, too. It was hard. But good. Good, too. How are you?"

"Good! Good but hard."

They laugh.

Sakura likes it when Hinata laughs at a dirty joke. There's something revolutionary about a demure women exposing her immodest side.

"You know, I wish we'd all been friends in the Acadamy," she says. Hinata nods, agreeing.

"Yeah," Naruto responds, "Our group didn't really click until after."

"There was a lot of anger back then, I remember. People just seemed to disdain each-other."

"Hormones."

"Yeah."

"Sasuke was such an ass."

"You too!"

"What?!" he laughs, unfolding his arms.

"Yeah! Always interrupting class with your antics. Writing your name everywhere, on desks and walls and shit. It is a miracle anyone learned anything with you around."

"I slept most of the time, though."

"NOT most of the time. No."

"I remember."

"How would you remember if you were sleeping?"

He blinks. Hinata giggles.

"Shikamaru liked to sleep too," she says.

Sighing audibly, dramatically, gesturing to an invisible classroom, Sakura says, "The Hokage and his Jonin Adivsor, people."

They all laugh. Naruto's nose is pink from the cold, his cheeks pink from laughter.

"Besides," he says, "You secretly liked all my pranks. Don't even lie."

"Not _all_ of them."

"So you admit you liked them."

"Not ALL of them," she says, spindling for words, "I liked the eraser prank. When we first met Kakashi-sensei."

"Yeah, that was great."

"And, I liked the one when you-"

"Did you like when I turned into a girl, to trick Iruka-sensei?"

"What? No. No. That was stupid."

"It was great! Hinata liked it."

Sakura looks at her. She smiles.

"No she didn't, Naruto."

"Yeah, she did! Hinata loved all my pranks."

"Uhuh. Right."

"Or what about when I said the Shinobi Code all wrong?"

"That was pretty funny. But, you didn't come up with good made up codes, though. Like, it would have been really funny if you'd made good ones. But you just made poop and sex jokes. You just turned the Code into a bunch of poop and sex jokes."

"Right?!"

"No, Naruto. No."

He laughs.

"So, what are you doing out here? Aren't you going to come inside?"

"It's nice out."

Sakura raises an eyebrow, unsure which lane to take. A cold wind blows, shivering her bones.

"Well-"

Her phone buzzes.

Naruto keeps talking, laughing, bringing up all sorts of pranks he did back in the day, most of them unsuccessful. Hinata obliges him, smiling, polite and mannered. Sakura stands there freezing, hands in her pockets, biting her lower lip.

She laughs on accident. There was no joy in the laughter. A wood-slap of a laugh. She doesn't understand why it happened. But Naruto keeps talking. His voice is a bluster, a swarm, as if he used the Shadow Clone Jutsu to make 100 of himself, just to keep talking.

He makes a joke she didn't hear.

She laughs.

But something darkens in Sakura. In her memories. The violence, maybe, the patriarchy, the unaccepted anger. Naruto stands before her, all powerful. The strongest shinobi in the world. The most popular human on Earth. Possessing the ability to convince mass murderers to turn over new leaves. Yet, it took her nearly two years to receive funding for her hospital. Their sensei is the Hokage, yet it took almost two years. Hinata was the heiress of the Hyuuga Clan, yet it took almost two years.

Her anger snarls, rising in her chest. Naruto grins at her, in that horrible way he grins, as if everything is always alright, even though nothing is ever alright, and he stands there, grinning, morphing in her mind into something he is not.

He would never abuse women, but how many times did he disregard her? She took the blame, internalized the blame, for Naruto's obsession with bringing Sasuke back. And all those times they tried to protect her. They had their own, private rivalry going while she just got to sit in the back and watch, for years. It wasn't until they left that she improved. It wasn't until they left that she became a doctor, a prodigy, a Chunin.

When he returned, she faded, she obscured, becoming a pink flower in the background, crying all the time; God how she cried. She used to hate herself back then, for her weakness, for her fragility. They seemed so much stronger than her, the men in her life. Naruto, with all his pain and light. Kakashi, her mentor, who never bothered to teach her what he taught them, who wrote her off as a girl the first chance he got, who tossed her into the Forest of Death armed with nothing more than shuriken and wit.

Even now, the world disregards her. She helped to seal Kaguya. She snapped Her horn. She punched a god in the face. Yet, the men are lauded. The men just want to be alone with each-other, in their special little offices, in their board meetings, on their sacred journeys. Her forehead burns, her fist tightens.

"Hinata," she says, sharp and flat, like the broadside of a kunai, interrupting Naruto's ongoing monologue, hating herself desperately yet unable to remove the violence from her tone, "Why don't you go to Banshee?"

Stiffening, dropping her gaze, Hinata searches herself for the right words, finding only unforgiving empty spaces. Normally, the words appear, as if written by blue fire in her thoughts. She is a speech-giver, a convincer, a master of the colloquially known 'Talk no Jutsu,' as the news media calls it.

But, the men are easier to deal with than the women. The men are obvious, and unsubtle, and horny, and the women are angry, and righteous, and subversive. Everyone was a child soldier, but the kunoichi dealt with an extra layer of shame, injustice, and social fatigue, for generations. As a result, they, as a whole, as the entity called Kunoichi, became the better diplomats and also the crueler interrogators.

"I just don't want to," she finally responds, looking up, looking Sakura in the eyes. She flinches at the opal white, the empty and the all-seeing. She feels completely known, unable to hide, and that - for a shinobi - is the most frightening feeling possible.

"What's a Banshee," Naruto asks, and the moment deflates like a balloon. The air is cold and momentarily windless. The sky is dark and blue and unmarked. The crowds of drunks move, sway, like a massive, bloated, pale carp floating upside down on a long, black river.

"It's a kunoichi rights group," Sakura states, almost sighing, appearing bored on the outside but twisting with self-loathing on the inside. This is another symptom of being a shinobi. Two halves of yourself. Your face is a mask. Your insides are made of steel boxes. Inside the boxes: twisting writhing darkness. You put everything you cannot digest there. Romance, ambition, second-guesses, everything that takes critical and introspective thoughts. As the times change, and the cultural restrictions loosen, she, and shinobi as a whole, finds herself ignorant of how to live properly and well.

"Oh - great! Yeah, women need stuff like that, for sure," Naruto says, smiling like a war hero.

Hinata and Sakura exchange glances.

"I'll see you inside?"

"For sure," he responds, slapping her shoulder. Hinata says nothing. Winking, unsure why she winked, as if winking could undo everything unsaid and said, Sakura leaves them there, shuffling towards the front entrance, the line of smokers scanning her body with their leering eyes, the big burly bouncer glancing at her face, as if he recognizes her. Maybe he does, she thinks, her thoughts pulsing, her forehead tightening, like someone pressing their thumbs against her temples.

"Can I go inside," she asks, pulling out her ID. Unfolding his arms, something twinkles in the bouncer's tiny, black eyes.

"Course."

— — —

After Sakura leaves, her presence remains. Her boot-prints in the frost. Her hospital scents. The ghost of her voice. The noise of her tonight - all accusation and stress. We hate ourselves when we leave the room toxic.

We also feel empowered, or elevated, or austere.

It feels good to crush. It feels good to accuse.

Sometimes, it feels better, even, than laughter, or companionship, or romance. There is a certain powerful joy in the act of division, in the black mark of divorce, and in the stamping on the lights of another person.

You become more vivid. You become well-lit.

It is a terrible, selfish thing we do, picking apart peoples' happinesses, tightening the wrong knots and snipping loose the good ones, creating an interpersonal web that looks like burnt, smoking villages and long, rickety wooden bridges. Treating our relationships, those special campfires, in the way saw-mills treat forests. We pillage. We subject. Sometimes, we fertilize so as to protect our futures.

Goodness is difficult. Kindness is often out of reach. That which rests on our highest shelves and pedestals is the first to collect dust. Compassion is not a written, de-coded thing. It takes philosophy, judgment, balance, and faith.

Villainy, however, is simply appealing. Like guilt and shame. Like desperation. There is something self-gratifying about rock bottom. The match sighs with relief when you crush its little flame between your forefinger and thumb.

But this is not good enough for Naruto, who has strived, hated. Who used to paint his anger onto monuments. Who used to shout his anger at teachers, classmates, and on battlefields.

So, he sighs, resting the back of his head against the brick and ivy, glancing sideways at her. He sees her shining, pale eyes. Her long river of black hair. Her wintry breath.

A wind blows, cold and unforgiving. A street-lamp flickers, burning out. Something smells like sulphur.

"Do you - do you think I know you, Hinata?"

Trying to find the right words, sometimes, often, is like trying to fit pieces of glass together. Curling her lips inwards, she stares at his blue, electric eyes, knowing there is no way to avoid this conversation, this moment in their lives.

So, she nods. A nod is simple, engaging, and self-evident.

"Why?"

Staring up at the dark, empty sky, Hinata wishes she had a purse or satchel, so she could clutch the strap or busy herself with something from inside - a tiny mirror, a breath mint, a pen cap, anything - but she doesn't carry her things that way. She doesn't have things to carry. She doesn't wear make-up. She doesn't carry tampons unless it is her time of the month. All ninja pants have pockets. As such, she feels adrift, as if the world turns without her, standing there by the wall, unable or unwilling to grab onto his arm.

She clears her throat.

"That wasn't your voice."

He blinks, frowns. Kurama chuckles.

"That was Kiba. You sounded like Kiba, just now."

Closing his eyes, Naruto hears Kiba's voice from before - _normal people get hurt and they stay hurt and they don't get better but they keep living anyway_ \- and an image flashes in Naruto's mind: Hinata at age nine, kneeling in a kimono, holding a tea-cup aloft, deciding whether or not to let it fall.

"Naruto?"

"I- It's just," he says, stumbling over his words, pausing, squinting. She blinks. Something darkens in her. She feels like his willing worry doll. Rarely has she seen such indecision in him. But, she recalls, a light turning on somewhere, Naruto is usually indecisive at the worst possible moments. When she left with Toneri, the world could have been destroyed had Shikamaru and Sakura not talked to him. When Neji died, the war could have been lost had she and Kurama not talked to him. When Pain pinned him to the ground, he could have died had she not stepped in and had his father not appeared to him. This is an ongoing trait, Naruto's insecurities cropping up at the critical moments of strife.

Someone laughs across the street. A gate somewhere creaks open, hinges squealing.

"Because, we share the same nindo. That's how I know you know me," she says, raising her chin, forcing eye contact, "And - you're my reason for trying, for changing. I used to be so weak and self-defeating. But you saved me. I've told you this before. You're the reason I am who I am today. That why you know me. You're the reason I am who I am. That is why you know me. So stop worrying about all that. Stop listening to the things Kiba says. He's just - he's in pain."

Holding her breath, she feels poignant, convincing.

But Naruto sticks to his nindo.

"That just means you've - uh - transformed into me, you know? It's like a Henge. It's just - I don't like people who aren't themselves, you know," he says, glancing at her, stopping when he sees the hurt in her face, instantly regretting everything he's ever done, then continuing past the regret, because honesty always, always becomes warmth if you go deep enough, "No, no wait. That's - that, I didn't mean that _like_ that. It's just - do you think _I_ know _you_ , is what I mean. You know? You're a fascinating - you… Have I tried to learn who you are? Have I even tried to do that?"

"Of course you have," she says, lowering her face, staring into the concrete and the frost. Sakura's boot-prints. Crushed cigarettes butts. Someone still laughing down the street.

"No, no. I mean, don't just - you don't have to - to be the different archetypes. You know? Like, I want to know _you_. I already know the compassionate, caring Hinata, and I know the hard-working, inspired Hinata, and I know the troubled, quiet Hinata, and - but I want to know the you you. The - um… It's easier to talk to, to mass murderers, sometimes, than - wow, no, I don't mean that like that, I'm just saying that - uh - that I want to know you better, you know?"

"Naruto, just…"

"And, I want you to meet Kurama."

Kurama growls inside the pit of his gut, declining. Hinata blinks in disbelief.

"Really?"

Naruto nods, gripping her with his eye contact. He is hard to look at, sometimes. Sometimes he is perfect. Sometimes he is hard to look at. It's funny how the tides turn, how quickly things revert back to the easier norm.

He keeps talking.

She sees no point of entry, no weakness or crack in the castle of his monologue. Like a shinobi, she tries to find a space to crawl through, a way to stealthily infiltrate the conversation, but there is nothing. Just the whirlwind of his voice. Stumbling and running through the stumbling. Trying to instigate her. Trying to make her react. But leaving no room for her reaction. She is an opal, ceramic wall. She is nine, again, in a kimono. He can't stop talking. As if there is a hundred of him, talking all at once. She feels removed from it, as if floating in orbit around the planet of him. The whole planet talking, talking at once, talking over himself, talking.

 _Shut up, kid,_ Kurama snarls.

He slaps himself.

She blinks, opens her mouth.

"What did-?"

"Who - who knows you better than me?"

She shrugs. Their shoulders are not touching anymore. They are the most sober people in the Utatane District, tonight.

"I-"

Across the street, a fireball appears then vanishes, illuminating all the ice and windows in a flash. Like a red flower blooming in then out of existence.

A crowd of people burst into excited laughter and cheers. In the middle, drunk, the perpetrator still holds his hands in the tiger sign, smoke trailing from his lips. He will have sex with a citizen, tonight.

"Wow," Hinata says, frowning, shaking her head.

"Yeah… So…"

"He'll hurt someone, like that."

"Right…"

"Should we call the police, do you think?"

"Well…"

"We could arrest him ourselves," she says, then stops, trying to remember all the litany of shinobi legislation passed since the Sixth took over, "Wait. Can we? Can we still do that?"

"I don't think so. That's what the Konohagakure Police Department is for."

"Right… Right."

"If it was still the Military Police Force, then maybe. Things are different now, though."

"We could report him."

She stares across the street, at the drunken shinobi blowing fireballs, the firelight flashing in her Byakugan.

"We could report him," she repeats.

"So," Naruto starts, meandering back into the topic of conversation, "Who do you think? Who knows you better than me?"

"Hold on," she says, raising her fingers, muttering the incantation, the veins around her eyes thickening, turning blue.

"Hinata…"

"Oh…"

"What?"

"He's just using lantern oil. He's not a shinobi."

Naruto loosens his scarf. She lowers her hands, her veins receding.

"He's just pretending. Impersonating a shinobi."

"Hinata."

"Hmm?"

She looks at him. He looks at her.

"Stop trying to avoid the conversation."

Her lips tighten. _Im out of chakra_ , she hears the impostor across the street saying.

"Who knows you better than me. I want to know you better than anyone."

"I'm not sure-"

"Your family? Ko? Hanabi?"

She nods, then nods sideways. She doesn't know why she did that. It's not a gesture that means anything. She feels tangled in wire, dangling.

"Hinat-"

"Who else," she says, glaring at him, "Do _you_ think knows me better?"

There was something like a command in her voice. This is new. This is a new thing. She sounded like how he imagines mothers sound. The mothers he sees on Tv, when their son tries to leave the house without sitting down for breakfast, that's how he thinks she sounded. The command. The snap of it. The suddenly built wall of it. Like a bird of prey waiting on a ledge, motionless. Women fight differently than men, he realizes.

"Sorry," he says. The crowd across the street disperses, herding towards the dives further down the slope, into the final trench of the District. Their laughter, chatting voices recede behind the wind.

"Its fine. Just go ahead."

Clearing his throat, Naruto begins counting on his fingers, "Kiba, I think. I think he knows you better."

He sneaks a look at her face. There is no reaction. She just stares across the street, hands in her coat pockets, like a lavender shellbug of herself.

Swallowing his spit, he continues, "Shino. Kurenai, obviously. Um - I think, maybe, I think I might be next on the list? After Sakura, though, too, and Tenten, Ino… Oh, and your family, first, of course… Um. Hiashi. Hanabi. Ko. Um, the - uh - I forget her name, um, Hanabi's, like, personal nanny, or whatever. And, um… Maybe a few others. Um. Maybe Kiba's sister. Hana, I think. And. And, I think that is it? Was I right?"

"I don't know," she answers, staring across the street as if from faraway. He waits for her to turn and face him. Something smells like skunks. Music from the clubs has texture, pressure but not noise.

She doesn't turn to him. Her eyes are empty, white.

Following her gaze, he sees a shaft of moonlight draping like a translucent veil over a scraggy, leafless ginkgo tree. It shouldn't be there, amidst the city lights. Something burns in Naruto's gut, a hatred he still cannot unravel. Toneri's pale, sickly face lingers in his thoughts. The man on the moon, wallowing in his own graveyard of loneliness, forever watching them, forever stealing their privacy.

"Why are you so troubled?" Hinata says, a tremor in her voice, "What happened?"

"It's just," he starts, stops, looking up at the moon, so vibrant and fat in the dark blue sky, almost gloating, "He, well. _He_ -"

He stops when her chakra fluctuates. Both of them possess ancient, powerful chakra.

"I'm sorry that, that I didn't get there sooner," he says, feeling watched, feeling judged, "And I'm sorry that I was so quick to forgive him, back then. To - I thought, I thought I could treat him like I treat my own enemies. And. I don't know. That - that wasn't my choice to make. I'm sorry you had to just go along with it, like that."

Reaching out, he touches her neck with his bandaged fingers. She flinches, relaxes.

"It's better to forgive, you know? I know it's better to forgive," he says, almost whispering, pulling her in closer, holding her.

She lets him.

This is a struggle within herself. Wanting to be near him, to feel the warmth of his chakra and his body. She loves him. She knows this about herself. But also wanting, now, suddenly, somehow, to be away from him, to be alone in her personal mythology. He takes that from people. Their pain, their villains. He becomes the main character in everybody else's conflicts.

For a moment, a snarl of cruelty rises in her gut. She feels immature and vindicated.

Fuck Kiba, she wants to say. Fuck Ino, Fuck Sakura. Just for once, she wants to surprise them all.

As a little girl, cursing was fun. Hanabi was the best at cursing, she knew all the good words, somehow. Hinata tried to be proper, but, on occasion, when she was alone, a certain depravity would emerge. She'd swear into the vastness of her bedroom. It felt conspiratorial and audacious to do this. The noble heiress, Hyuuga Hinata, who follows all the rules, secretly condemning everything important.

 _Fuck Father_ , she'd mutter. _Fuck Sister_. _Fuck Grandfather, and Natsu, and Tokuma, and Hoheto, and Iroha_. _Fuck Suzume-sensei and Iruka-sensei_. _Fuck the mean girls at school, Ami and Ino_. _Fuck Sasuke,_ _for stealing all of Naruto's light_. _Fuck the adults who hate him and talk bad about him_. _Fuck Neji who disdains me_. _Fuck Mother for dying_. _Fuck Ko for never letting me be alone_. _Fuck all of father's friends_. _Fuck the Hokage_. _Fuck the Hyuuga Clan_. _Fuck Kumogakure_. _Fuck Uncle Hizashi_ for dying. _And, fuck Mr. and Mrs. Uzumaki, wherever they are_.

That's how she finished these lonely, quiet tirades. It always came back back to Naruto. She always made sure to finish with Naruto's pain. Even during the early Academy years, she valued him more than herself.

Then, she would cry until Ko showed up to soothe her, to make snacks for her, or take her to the park, or play board games, or train.

Somewhere, this anger still lives in her, unannounced, unquestioned.

Fuck Toneri, it says. Fuck Hamura. Fuck Banshee and Koharu Utatane and Tsume. Fuck Kamminaron. Fuck Shikamaru for telling her boyfriend to be more like a politician. Fuck Kiba for his drunkenness, his self-destruction. Fuck Shino for not even trying to protect his clan's forest. Fuck Sasuke for always hurting the people important to her. Fuck the Homestead Act. Fuck the Hyuuga for not helping the other clans despite all their money and contacts. Fuck the feudal lords. Fuck the Chunin Exams. Fuck the Alliance for letting people like Orochimaru live. And, fuck the Fourth Hokage for sealing a demon into his son's body.

If she said these things out loud, she would feel honest. Then, he would have to forgive her. Then, the honesty would become guilt. The guilt would crystallize, fossilize, and what remains of her torn, traumatized existence would be ruined.

So, she keeps silent. She lets him lead. Sometimes, she lies.

"Hinata?"

She doesn't need to forgive anyone. Naruto can forgive. She never wanted to be a ninja. She never wanted to be Hokage. Naruto can be Hokage. She just wants to live life on her own terms, for once. She just wants to protect.

"You're the only good thing in this world," she states. Naruto frowns. She feels his chakra ruminating, his muscles tensing. Somewhere, Kurama agrees with her.

"Everything else is rotten," she continues, pressing her face into her neck. Kurama grins inside the darkness of Naruto's body. He looks away, up at the moon and the sky and the yellow haze of city lights.

"Sorry," Naruto mutters.

In his arms, she feels like a villain. Like Zabuza, or Haku, or Gaara, or Nagato, or Obito. All the people he's changed. Neji, and Sasuke, and Inari, and Sai. She is just like them, he realizes, feeling sick, feeling unstable. For a long time, he thought she was untainted by the shinobi life. That she would always be able to support him. That she was compassionate by nature. She is not, he realizes now. Within her lies a cruelty, a villainy, and the possibility of darkness. Just like him. Just like anyone he's ever known. Another victim of, as his mentor framed it, 'the madness of the shinobi system.'

The Hyuuga came from the moon. Now, they are human.

"Sorry."


	5. Chapter 5

The inside of the bar is like a pot of boiling water. Music plays on the speakers hung from the ceiling. Rapid, unabashed instrumentals, tangential riffs, clattering drums and aching vocal chords. The music acts like a fishing net, holding everyone together, pulling them from the water of routine.

All these citizens dancing together, in a fat wobbling crowd, like something cultural, like a rain dance, a struggle to keep out the bad spirits, something spiritual made of tattoos and guttural noises, so you drink and smoke and grin and laugh and flirt and dance, touching, humping, grinding, groping. Flashing, glinting sweat. Unorthodox, strange movements. Windmills of arms. Stamping feet, shimmying waists and hips.

It ignites something in Sakura, both a loathing and a seduction. This is her dichotomy. Having left her white coat of professionalism in the locker back at the hospital, she allows her limbs to loosen, her blood to rush, her pupils to dilate. There is something good about destruction, instinct. Thoughtlessness. Spontaneous joy. Crushing everything loathsome inside of a tin can, a smashed bottle, the stub of a cigarette. Inside of her, a darkness tries to open its wings; she bites her lower lip; she tastes iron.

She would never let herself lose all control, only the semblance of control.

Bouncing on the balls of her feet, like a coil, a spring, she peers out across the valley of the crowd. Tops of heads, bobbing. Flailing, wild hair. Hands reaching up, grabbing without strength.

On the other side of the bar, where stillness exists, she sees her friends at a pool table, lit by a warm, amber sconce. The image of them there, standing around the table together, smiling, laughing, rosy cheeks and bright white eyes, reminds her of a Norman Rocko painting, an ad for the Day of Thanks, her parents.

Sakura blinks, rubbing her eyes.

"Heeeyy, girl," someone says behind her. Without even looking, she tosses her hand up like a fly-swatter, batting him away. She hears him laughing as she delves into the crowd, squeezing through the narrows crags and crevices, allowing people to touch her, inadvertently or verdantly, everywhere. Her parka protects her. Her austerity protects her.

Pushing past to the other side, she steps up to the bar, maintaining all order and sterile grace. Her lips carve a smile, demure and contained, unindulgent but exuding wisdom. She is amongst animals. She must remain composed at all times.

The bar-top is full, every stool taken, so she leans between two women - "thanks," she says, and they smile at her, winking - she raises her fingers towards the bartender, like hailing a rickshaw, and he drops his glare upon recognizing her face.

Through his massive black beard, he grins.

The Yin Seal is distinctive. So is the pink hair. Without trying to, she has become somewhat of a celebrity in the Utatane District. Even though she herself is not much of a punk, by any standard, it seems that style and general womanhood are enough to be called subversive. Sometimes, it feels like anything she does is considered, by the District people, an attack on patriarchal establishment. As if simply working, studying, and being articulate is so brave, so powerful, so liberating.

On the one hand, she is grateful for the District. People here open to new norms. Accepting any and all so long as they wish to party. This sense of space allows her certain new freedoms she never had as a budding child soldier or a doctor. Here, she is allowed to stumble. Here, she is allowed to be better than everyone else, to take her rightful place as Queen.

On the other hand, she cracked her own glass ceilings, again and again, and continues to do so, by being a prodigy doctor, and a war hero, and sealing Kaguya, and founding the Clinic, and becoming a Jonin, but all the District people want to compliment her on is her dyed hair and her super strength. These aesthetics of little substance and value. Perhaps the ninja-punk revolution is just a thing of images, two dimensions, something quick and vapid like a gust of rotted wind. It'll burn out. It'll shrivel.

Besides, Horimoto took that from her. Her pride. Her honor.

Sakura blinks, smiles.

The music plays. People drink and kiss all around her.

"Come here often," the bartender jokes, adjusting his glasses. There is something cute about his nose, upturned like a warthog.

Her eyes flashing like they are such best buddies, Sakura scrounges a knowing smile, a tease of a smile, "Nice one, Toro," she says, pulling her satchel up, digging for her wallet. He raises a hand, shooing away her attempt to pay.

"Ever since you saved Doro's life - you _know_ you get free drinks."

"Just your friendly neighborhood medic," she quips, closing her bag, "Thanks, though. How's he doing?"

"Fine, fine. Got himself a girlfriend. They've been at it for a few weeks now."

"Great!"

"Yeah! You know, it's nice. It's real nice. She likes him regardless, you know?"

"Despite - the amputated-"

" _That_ ," he chuckles, stroking his beard, " _And_ just the way he is. You know."

Sakura laughs like dynamite.

"Say hello for me."

"Will do. Of course. Here," he replies, setting down the her drink. Fat curve of a lemon slice, perched atop the rim. Thin black straw sitting inside the ice and whiskey. A tiny white napkin below the glass. She picks it up, leaving a wet spot on the napkin, smiling at him.

"Thanks!"

He waves her off, scurrying down the bar, searching for the next patron. After leaving a tip, Sakura pulls out her tin of breath mints, opens the latch, and stares at the contents. Her whiskey ice winks at her. Someone in the crowd laughs like a scream. The music changes, harder, faster, louder, fatter. Taking one out - a food pill - she stares at the tiny perfect sphere before setting it on her tongue, letting it roll down to the top of her throat. Taking a sip of whiskey, she swallows before weaving back into the dancing crowd, aiming for the pool tables on the other side of the bar. 

— — — 

"Sorry," he says again, holding her in his arms. She looks up at him. His face above her, staring outwards into the street. His chin, held up by tiny pinpricks of stubble. His cheeks, marked by the harsh whiskers of Kurama.

"What could you be sorry for?"

"Just - everything. I don't know. Everything, yahknow."

Staring at him, she extricates herself from his arms. The city is cold and slender. The sky - dark and slumbering - lies heavy above it all, pressing against the tops of towers, tenement, steaming roofs and power-lines.

"There's nothing to be sorry for," she tells him, watching his breath obscure his mouth, like smoking, like they are in an opium den, vapor sliding out their nostrils, stumbling out from between their lips, everything happening slowly.

Folding her arms, leaning back against the ivy and brick wall, she stares out at the street - the dishevelment, the staggering drunks, the vast windows looking into busy bars and clubs - she wants to be away from all this.

Just a few hours ago, they were at his kitchen table, by the little drape-less window-sill with the tiny potted bonsai plant, eating red bean buns he had purchased from a convenience store. His three scarves were hanging over the back of a chair: the long woolen red scarf she knitted for him; the blue-white checkered scarf with the frilly ends that was his mother's; and the bright orange cotton scarf he owned for years. They were deciding which he should wear. It was easier back then, in that era which ended only a few hours ago.

He coughs.

"I wasn't able to save you," he says. His eyes flat and blue, hands stuffed inside the pockets of his parka.

Hinata looks away, down at her boots, the concrete, the frost.

She wants to travel back in time and refuse to go out to the District. They would have had sex in his bed, she decides, knowing the city is alive all around them, like an animal prowling outside the windows and roof, like a flock of crows in the hallway, outside the door, at the peephole, volatile and violent, but unable to disturb the sanctity of his apartment. Their safe-haven. Their incubator. Their own personal dimension.

She wonders if Uchiha Obito ever, often, or perhaps, maybe, even regularly, went to Kamui just to be so alone.

It would be nice to have a Kamui, she thinks, staring at the street-lamps - red and blue lanterns, like glowing pop bottles - where they could be together without interruption, without the possibility of interruption. No moonlight, no ANBU guards, no drunk District denizens, no random and rabid fans, no Konoha Eleven, and no Hyuuga Clan.

Or, perhaps something more dangerous, she recalls, smiling narrow, growing and unhidden.

"Hinata?"

"Do you remember when we first started dating and, when you'd walk me home at night, I'd only let you take me to that bridge?"

"The one running over the creek?"

"Gekko's Creek, yeah. Gekko's Creek and the - the Uzuki Bridge."

"Yeah, I remember that, yahknow. It's where all the glow-worms hung out."

"Did I tell you why?"

"About the worms?"

She shakes her head, laughing. Her laugh is like fine china.

"No, no - about why - why I only let you walk me to there."

He shakes his head. She smiles, glancing down the street. They hear a long, low whistle in the air, muffled by the distance of several blocks. Then, faraway laughter, like a smoke bomb of laughter.

"Father's field of vision - um, when he's at home, in his bedroom, late at night, past my curfew - it only reaches as far as the end of that bridge," she says, looking at him. He looks like a handsome toad. Like she is a princess in one of those old gruesome folk tales.

Naruto blinks, laughing. Kurama laughs, too, unheard.

"Well," she continues, "His eyesight's gotten worse, anyway. He probably can't even see to Noharu Street, anymore, let alone the bridge…"

"So, you out-shinobi'd him, yahknow."

"Well, it was Hanabi who discovered it, actually."

They are quiet a moment. A light snow begins to fall. The power-lines run thick and black and taut over their heads. The chain-link fence above the wall is encrusted with ice. The street is emptier than before, the drunks having gone back inside the bars and clubs. Now, they are alone, with the bouncers, the roving homeless, and the last dregs of smokers.

Naruto smiles, looking up.

"What if he just - Hiashi, um, what if he happened to walk _outside_ and look? It was past your curfew, usually, right? He'd have seen us, yahknow."

Hinata shrugs, "Maybe I wanted him to. I don't know, really."

Naruto watches her. She looks like an oil painting. Pale, pink-ish, blue-ish colors and a single brushstroke of black hair. Her clothing is strange and nonsensical. Thick, plastic lavender boots. A warm winter parka. But, then, also, kaki shorts. Her knees looks rosy and cold. He's seen her do this before, too, wearing things out of season. Her fashion sense does not exist, likely due to never having to choose her clothing as a child. Always, she was dressed for occasions by her nannies - and everyday was an occasion.

He laughs a little because she picked his scarf out for him, tonight.

"Hmm?"

"Nothing, nothing," he says, waving it away. She smiles at him.

"Under the bridge," she says, coy, as if toying with an idea, "Under the bridge, Hanabi stowed some things."

Kurama chuckles. Naruto blinks.

"Like what?"

She keeps eye contact with him, something deviant emerging from her expression that he has never seen before in her, like she is suddenly a stranger, someone new, gaining another dimension - she says it plainly, simply, "Condoms and a bed-roll."

"Wh-"

"Liquor, too, I think - or wine, probably. Probably wine. Well - I don't know. She might have drank it all by now, though."

"How old is she?"

"Too young for all that," she admits, glancing down at her hands, her pink fingers, "But - I don't know. After everything that happened on the moon… I guess, I guess it just doesn't seem to matter, really, if she does things like that. It just doesn't seem to matter anymore, really. I mean, she's - I don't know. She was in Konoha during the War, you know. When the Zetsu attacked. She fought them; she lived; she watched our grandfather die there. And then, on the moon - well."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

A street-lamp flickers. The snow falls heavier, fluffier.

"Wait - is she already, like-"

Hinata nods. Naruto grimaces. Kurama scoffs.

"It was someone from Takigakure, she told me," Hinata says, exhaling, "During last year's Chunin Exams. A Genin who failed the first test."

"Could've at least picked someone good," he grumbles, hands in his coat pockets.

She chuckles, pausing, considering, "I guess I just don't think I need to be a good example anymore."

From within Naruto's gut, Kurama applauds her. Naruto blinks, frowning.

"I never really was, anyway," she continues, her breath like ice, "She was always better at Juuken. The grown-ups like her more, too. That's all that really mattered back then. I don't think I care what she does now; she's enough of an adult. She still ties little toys to her kunai, though."

"Do you want me to talk to her?"

"About what?"

"I - all that, you know. About being a shinobi."

Hinata looks away, shrugging off his offer.

Choices we make, things we say - we can be so flippant and disregarding, stumbling our way into life-changing conversations without even realizing it, without even realizing there - often - is no way back.

"Hinata?"

"Naruto," she says, and he stands up straighter, reacting to the calloused maternity in her tone, as though he is her son instead of her boyfriend, "I think - you're doing that thing you do."

 _That thing you do_. Honesty housed in ambiguity. It's political, almost. Sometimes, he forgets that she is a diplomat. Among their peers, only she and Shikamaru have travelled to all Five Major Ninja Villages.

.

" _That thing I do? What's that?"_

" _When you take on everyone's burdens."_

 _._

After the moon almost fell, and the trauma Hinata suffered at the hands of Toneri (which, as Banshee reminds people in their newsletters, is not unlike trauma suffered by kunoichi for generations), as well as her subsequent reprimand for going rogue without reporting to the lead Jonin, she stopped being assigned regular field missions. No more combat. No more infiltration. No more spying. Instead, the Sixth, taking notice of her masterful manipulations of Toneri, handed her missions of diplomatic nature. She began visiting with foreign leaders: businessmen, politicians, lords and Kage. It was a return to the tea ceremonies of her youth. Wearing kimonos, speaking delicately, always with ulterior motives.

.

" _I don't do that. Do I do that?"_

 _She raises an eyebrow at him, "Naruto."_

Last year, she attended the Fourth Tsuchikage's inauguration ceremony, which was the first public Kage Inauguration since the Alliance formed. Kakashi was the first new Kage after the war, but his ceremony was private and didn't happen until almost two years into his reign. As such, the Tsuchikage's inauguration was an iconic moment in Alliance history.

All major nations sent representatives, as did all major factions, clans and lordships. Among thousands of attendees, there were the Gokage and their bodyguards, elder advisors, and families; the Earth Daimyo's immediate and extended family along with several attendants, political allies and advisors; the chiefs and top-ranking ninja of minor villages, including the Hidden Stone, the Hidden Earth, the Hidden Waterfall, the Hidden Grass, and the Hidden Rain; politicians from the Land of Earth, the Land of Wind, the Land of Iron, the Land of Rain, the Land of Rivers, and the Land of Tea; executives from the continent's most profitable companies, such as the Fire Iron Mining Corporation, the Transit Syndicate of the Waves, and a tech start-up known simply as The Rock; representatives from most noble and powerful clans, such as the Hyuuga, the Aburame, the Akimichi, the Taketori, the Hattori, the Yotsuki, the Kamizuru, the Karatachi, the Akebino, the Hoshigaki, the Momichi, and the Ameyuri clans; even a few representatives from the Animal Kingdoms allied with Iwagakure, such as the Den of Worms, the Osprey's Nest, the Land of Bears, the Cavern of the Great Komodo Dragon, and the powerful Hill of Stone Ants; and, of course, a litany of renown shinobi heroes, such as Darui the Lazy Panther of Kumogakure, Dodai of the Rubber Fist, Karui the Thunderchild, Ebisu the Respected Strategist of Suna, Maki the Great Sealer, Temari the Fan Dancer, Zushishi the Last Hunter of Mist, Chojuro of the Seven Blades, Might Guy the Noble Red Beast of the Leaf, Anko the Snake Charmer, Shikamaru of the Nara Clan, Yashiro of the Hero Water, Moomoo the Renown Shinobi Reader, and Triss the Basilisk of Kusa.

.

" _Well, I have to," Naruto replies, "When people can't."_

" _Why can't they? Can't they just endure?"_

 _He shakes his head, "They're too busy for that, yahknow."_

 _She stares at him._

 _._

It was festive. Dignitaries, nobles, and the elite of the Alliance - partying for three days straight. Hinata received almost twenty different marriage proposals. Enormous dowries from young princes, clan heirs, and trust fund inheritors. From a Yuki Clan survivor, she was offered an ice sculpture of a swan that lived and cawed and flew. From an sea captain of the Land of Waves, she was offered a yacht baring her name on which he promised to take her on a "seven year voyage across the seven deadly seas." From the feudal lord of the Land of Snow, she was offered a mountain on which had been built a ski resort. A director of movies, who had made Koyuki a star, offered to make her famous. A samurai known as the Blacksmith of Five Elements created, for her, a tanto with a heart-shaped handle. A boyish adventurer of the Red Sands told her he had sealed a genie in a bottle that could literally give her anything she wished for. When she asked why he didn't simply use it to wish for _her_ , he had no answer.

At first, she felt guilty turning them down, her father watching with restrained greed as all these riches passed in front of her like a river of gold. However, as the proposals mounted, as she became more and more annoyed, it became kind of fun rejecting them. She was coy about it. A simple shake of the head. A smile, a wince, a mote of silence. Once, she laughed out loud, inciting a forty-year-old scribe to spend the rest of the festivities in his suite, writing.

She began to understand Hanabi a little more.

When they'd ask why they were not good enough, she would simply reply, "I have someone waiting for me, back home," and Hiashi would smile, too, knowing full well who that anonymous man was. No prize could be better. No dowry larger, no name more iconic. His daughter was in love, and his clan was favored.  
.

" _Most people - people get hurt and they stay hurt."_

" _That's Kiba, again. You sound like Kiba, again."_

" _\- And someone has to be strong enough to help them."_

After the inauguration, Hinata decided not to come home right way. Going home, she knew, would be the end of something and the beginning of a new life. She would become pregnant, marry and raise a family. Naruto would become Hokage. She would retire from active ninja duties. There would never be another chance to see the world, to find herself. She made this choice without consulting her comrades, her friends or her commanding officers. She decided to travel through many Lands, searching for other clans that may be descended from refugees of the Ootsuki Moon War that brought the first Hyuuga to Earth.

It was time to commune with her ancestors.

With Ko in tow, she started in the Land of Earth, leaving Iwagakure on foot. They hitched a ride on a train boxcar straight to Ishigakure, a nearby Hidden Village, where they obtained food, lodging and better directions. The next morning, they hired two horses and rode through the Land of Stone, the Land of Silence, and stopped, again, this time on the border of the Land of Wind where they dispatched their horses and entered the desert on foot, without sherpas or camels.

Quickly, they got lost in the Red Sands, walking in concentric, forlorn circles for a whole day then freezing throughout the long, silent night. Using their Byakugan, they finally saw through the mirages and chose the correct routes, passing through towns, villages, and oasises, eventually finding themselves on a famous beach along northwestern border of the Nanmen Ocean - a long, vast, pristine white beach known simply as Fuu. There, they mingled with tourists, asking for a boat.

They boarded a fishing vessel and set sail in the morning.

For a long time, they sailed, landing on island after island, many of them uninhabited, others lost in time with the people there living like humans used to, hunting, fishing, planting, harvesting, and gathering. It was inspiring, in a way, to see people that had, somehow, zero carbon footprint. What feels impossible became suddenly so close and obtainable. A faraway, aching part of her wished to stay and live like they do. But that, too, is the island's allure, like a genjutsu, a seduction, so she kept moving onwards, landing on an island made of bone, known to the nearby locals as Kaguya's Hideout.

Ribcages stuck out of the ground like leafless forests. The earth was soft, like cartilage, and gleaming white, like marble. As she ascended the hill, she found a throne made of bones, skulls. This was the ancient home of the Kaguya Clan. There, she met a crony old fisherman with perpetually closed eyes. He looked to be beyond 80. He had long, draping white hair, with tiny cracked purple crystals imbedded in the follicles, cold to the touch. He told her he'd made the island his home, decade ago, after the Second of the Bloody Mist Wars, and that her answers would be Kirigakure.

Without spending the night, she ventured into the Sea of Mist. Using her blessed Byakugan, powered by Hamura's ancient chakra, she was able to see the correct pathway to the island. Within two days, she and Ko and their hired crew landed on Kirigakure's docks.

.

" _No, you don't."_

" _All of them. I have to."_

" _No you don't."_

The Mizukage, Mei Terumi, greeted her and told stories of the Mist's history. How the Third Mizukage, himself secretly possessing Yuki blood, cursed and banished all the Bloodline Clans, thus inciting the First of the Bloody Mist Wars. The Second Civl War would arrive over a decade later, just prior to the Third World War, resulting in Karatachi Yagura taking the throne and the Third disappearing. Less than a decade later, Yagura went back on all his promises, doubling down on the Bloody Mist standards, slaughtering clan after clan and surviving countless attempted coups. During one of these purges and coups, the Kaguya Clan invaded the Village and was destroyed by the regime, thus igniting the final of the Bloody Mist Wars that, in the end, took the Mizukage's life at the hands of Akatsuki.

Only one of the Kaguya survived, Mei claimed, and he later died while battling Gaara of the Desert.

So, Hinata and Ko returned to the Land of Wind, making a bee-line for Sunagakure. There, she met with the Fifth Kazekage who told her about the battle, the terrifying strength and the honorable will of Kimmimaro.

After proposing the idea that the Kaguya Clan came from the moon, she learned from his brother, Konkuro the Puppetmaster, of an ancient ninja named Monzaemon Tetsumon, the lauded creator of puppet-ninjutsu, who - on his deathbed - claimed an alien taught him all he knew.

With Ko, Konkuro, and Gaara in tow, she ventured deep into the ancient Ruined Library of the Wind People. A tower that had sunk under the desert centuries ago, said to contain a detailed and complete history of the world. Gaara led them to the bottom-most temples where she discovered her Byakugan, empowered once more by Hamura, could read the ancient hieroglyphs. Many walls and tablets were destroyed, but this was her greatest discovery yet.

She learned that after the Ootsuki Moon Wars, six refugees escaped to Earth via the same space-time tunnel she and her comrades had previously used to reach the moon. The genjutsu bubbles there had, in fact, been set by a moon ninja known as Ketsuya, who had gone on to settled in the Land of Lightning, founding the Chinoike Clan. The giant crab that impeded their path was, in fact, a summon left to guard the way by a moon ninja known as Arashi, who had gone on to traverse the Animal Kingdoms, becoming the first modern Sage, and whose apparition would, later, teach senjutsu to the First Hokage in the Shikkotsu Bone Forest. The ninja who had taught Monzaemon puppeteering was known as Hoki, whose descendants would form the Royal Suna House located in the Land of Rivers. The founder of the Kaguya Clan was known as Kimiya the Cursed Skeleton, who had been a leader in the resistance movement against the Ootsuki Clan and was assigned as the personal bodyguard to a woman known as Hinagiku, the last surviving main branch member of the Ootsuki, who, as all Hyuuga children are taught, know, was the founder of the noble Hyuuga Clan.

What shocked her most was the name of the final member of their escape party: Ootsuki Hana, the hieroglyph for 'prophet' scrawled beneath her image. Depicted in the murals as an eyeless member of the side branch, she was the only one without weaponry, her hands folded in front of her, a small, strange smile on her face.

"What shocks you so," Gaara asked her.

"She looks like my mother," Hinata replied.  
.

 _"There has to be another way."_

 _Naruto shakes his head, "There isn't."_  
.

Finally, Hinata understood why Hamura contacted her in particular and why Toneri needed her sister's eyes. If they were children of an Ootsuki themselves, and a prophet at that, it made sense. However, there was once more place to visit: the ruins of Uzushiogakure.

Together with Ko, she left the Land of Wind, travelled through the Land of Rivers, stopping at the Royal Suna House, then up the the corner of the Land of Fire, into the Land of Sound, stopping in new Otogakure to learn more of the Kaguya Clan, and continued onwards into the Land of Whirlpools.

During the Second War, Uzushiogakure had been attacked by an overwhelming force of ninja from three of the five major nations. Most of their ninja died, but a large chunk of the Hyuuga Clan had been in Konoha for a ceremony. Upon hearing word of their village's destruction, they stayed and became fully-fledged Leaf-ninja. Her grandfather, Hyuuga Harashi, was clan head at the time.

She had never visited the ruins before.

There, she learned about Yinshiki, a powerful being from the cosmos who had, after the death of Hamura, spun lies to the side branch of the Ootsuki Clan. It was he who convinced them to tear out their eyes, and start the Moon Wars, and slaughter the main branch. Years after the six refugees escaped to Earth, Yinshiki followed them and killed them one by one by devouring their souls. All Hyuuga children fear Yinshiki because of the fairy tails. None of them really believed it was real.

However, in the ruined temples of Uzushiogakure, Hinata learned differently.  
.

" _Naruto."_

 _He shakes his head._

" _Naruto."_

First, It killed Ketsuya, whose soul tasted like blackberries, and placed a curse of destruction on the Chioike Clan. Later, during the Izanagi Wars, the Uchiha slaughtered the Chinoike, leaving only Ketsuya's grandson alive and without a home.

Second, Yinshiki found the Great Sage Arashi in the Forest of Hidden Oaks. Meditating, Arashi accepted his death without complaint, without even opening his eyes or speaking a word or moving an inch. Impressed with his stoicism, Yinshiki ate him slowly, cutting little pieces of his soul away until there was nothing left, savoring the taste. His soul tasted like wood-chips and moss.

Third, Yinshiki landed in the Land of Rivers, where he met a small, childish, obsidian creature with yellow eyes. The thing told Yinshiki the location of Hoki the Puppeteer who had raised a family on the border, having obtained riches and nobility. In exchange for this information, Yinshiki named the creature - "You are now Zetsu" - and granted him the power of written language.

In the dead of night, Yinshiki stole Hoki from her bed, devouring her in the sky, and placing a curse of lovelessness upon the household. "No one from this family shall ever know true love," he claimed, cackling, licking his lips with the taste of Hoki's soul: like cold sugar water.

Fourth, Yinshiki flew to the Land of Water, where he descended upon the Island of Bones. He laughed at their tribal name - Kaguya - claiming "she had failed in every way," and proceeded to curse their people - "you shall be a warring folk, who only desire battle and vainglorious death" - before grabbing Kimiya from his bone-laden throne and swallowing his soul in one bite. "Your chief's soul is quite chewy, much chewier than the others," he said, laughing, flying away.

Fifth, Yinshiki arrived in the Land of Rice Paddies, where Hinagiku had wed a farmer named Hyuuga Hoka. He was a decent man. Neither vain nor greedy, neither exemplary nor disappointing. He owned several acres, a farmhouse, a herd of goats, sheep and heifers. All he wished was for a good, steady life of hard work and routine and a little bit of romance.

When Yinshiki touched down, destroying Hoka's crops in an instant, Hinagiku killed herself with a knife she always kept hidden in her sleeve. She would not become Yinshiki's meal. Enraged, Yinshiki gobbled up the souls of every farm animal, every goat, lamb, pig, and hound, Hoka himself, and all but one of their children. He left only the youngest son alive, placing a curse upon his forehead: "Your lineage shall suffer the fate of your ancestors, torn in two by greed and power."

And so, Yinshiki continued his search.

He found Ootsuki Hana in the Land of Whirlpools, at the temples of the Uzumaki Clan who had taken her in, believing - correctly - that she was a prophet. They were prepared for this day, for Hana, eyeless as she was, could see only the future.

When Yinshiki arrived, the Uzumaki Clan, led by their youngest but strongest warrior, Ashina, battled fiercely. The women strung Yinshiki up with glowing, red chains that wretched directly from their torsos, like a kind of umbilical chord. Ashina, wearing the Mask of the Death God, drew his blade, first cutting Yinshiki's left horn clean off then slicing his own abdomen open. All the souls Yinshiki had eaten escaped, disappearing into the Pure Land. Yinshiki was gutted, hornless, and chained. But even this was not enough. For twelve hours, they struggled. On the thirteenth hour, the eyeless prophet, Hana, approached Yinshiki, ate and swallowed her own pride, and said, "I forgive you, for what you did to my home and my family."

He capitulated, defeated. The ritual was complete. Yinshiki was sealed away into that very mask and, from then on, was only able to taste souls when summoned by human masters. It was said he could only be summoned three times and on the fourth time he would die, forced to commit seppuku, so goes the myth.  
.

 _She stares at him, waiting for him to capitulate._

 _Naruto stares back, waiting for the same._

Knowing a kind of inner peace, Hinata returned home to Konoha, finding it changed. The Utatane District. The Uzumaki Corridor. Senju Park. The Homestead Act. Who was Kamminaron, she wondered. Who are all these strange, foreign citizens, she asked. Refugees, they told her. Immigrants, emigrants and just people. At night, her friends were getting drunk, going out to strange bars and clubs. Kiba had been having blackouts and did not even realize she was gone for over three months.

"I thought you were on a mission," he said, one night, slobbering drunk.

She shook her head, "No."  
.

 _He stares at her, waiting for her to capitulate._

 _Hinata stares back, waiting for the same.  
_


	6. Chapter 6

Keeping her glass raised high above her head like a never-ending cheers, the lemon slice glinting under the bar-light, Sakura squeezes between the edge of the crowd and the corner of the bar. She feels like an eel, finding the nooks and crannies between dancing bodies, music thrumming in the middle of her head. She doesn't recognize the song. She can't hear the contents of the lyrics. It's all just noise, shapes and contours, textures and rhythm.

She blinks. Her eyes are dry. She rubs her eyes. She blinks.

It becomes easier to traverse. She doesn't feel the people around her, anymore. They are like cushions, like plush, giving way as she slides through. A little whiskey spills from her glass, dripping down her knuckles. She switches hands; she licks it off. It tastes sweet, like juice, like sugar water. Someone nearby shouts with glee. Someone else is clapping. Someone else is reciting spoken word poetry, his voice overthrown by the music above.

She tries to overhear, to eavesdrop, but something chimes in her thoughts like a silver bell.

" _Heyyyyyyy, so you got my texts,"_ she hears. Sakura grins, pulling herself through the final layer of people, stumbling out the other side of the crowd into a chair, a table full of empty coasters. All this sudden space, cluttered with chairs and stools and small circular tables. _It's like a mausoleum,_ she thinks, laughing.

" _No, it's not,"_ the voice says. Looking up, she takes a sip, biting the thin black straw. Her drink is cold. The ice jingles like a holiday. It tastes like nothing, anymore. Her tongue feels swollen; her teeth are like clay.

Across the valley of chairs and tables, she sees her friends.

They are like a painting, she thinks, all of them gathered together, draped in warm, orange light, but she cannot decide between Renaissance kitsch from the Rain or ancient murals from the ruins of the Land of Wind.

On the one hand, she feels the Konoha Eleven do represent something almost biblical. Like they could be prophets depicted in papyrus-bound scrolls and painted onto chapels, hung in museums, displayed in the houses of wealthy folks.

But, on the other hand, she also feels they are something completely new. Contemporary and warless. They fought in a war, yes, but they never instigated one. They don't bare that sin, yet - only the tragedy of war - the strife - is theirs.

Over the speakers, the music changes. A song called "Bastards of Young." Sakura purses her lips into a smile, taking a sip of whiskey, swaying in place. _This is the best of the Utatane District_ , she decides. Perfect and sleek and new.

"Sakura!" Ino shouts, waving at her from their portrait.

Grinning, she joins them.

— — —

Willing the other to speak next, they stare at each-other. He is taller than her and a man, but she is more convicted. A rough wind blows, shaking the chain-link fence above them. A radiator hums, whining like a pitbull. Across the street, a drunk teenager laughs, then coughs.

His expression is infallible, as if posing for the sculptor of the Hokage Stone Monument. Within all his compassion, there is something stubborn. Perhaps the stubborn thing drives the compassion forward. In order to forgive, he must be a little bit unforgiving. In order to change peoples' hearts, his must not waver.

Yet - he wavers. He wavers, often. He wavers because he is Ashura, who needed comrades, friends, allies, in order to fight evenly with Indra, who needed only himself. He wavers because he is vulnerable, and influenced, and human.

So - a light turns on, somewhere in the defeated world. Hinata knows what her role can be, is. If only she could get there. If only she could let him bring her there.

First, there is a silence to be broken. They are staring at one another, unwilling to speak and unwilling to look away. A street-lamp blinks. A squirrel dashes up the stalk of a ginkgo tree. The bouncer of Sheep's goes inside, to get out of the cold.

Hinata, being - in some ways - the stronger of the two, breaks the silence.

"The face you're making," she says, watching his expression shift by degrees, like someone moving beneath a canvas sheet, "Zabuza must have seen the same thing, back then."

He winces. Kurama opens one eye, fur bristling.

"And - Neji, too."

"I'm going to be Hokage," he declares, something calloused, raspy and adult lurking underneath his tone, as if he is already Hokage, and a father, and almost at war, "And - so - we can't just leave and go live on the moo- on the - on Myoboku, or something, away from everyone. The Hokage takes on everyone's burdens. Especially now, in the time of Alliance, yahknow."

"So - you're no different than Sasuke?"

"What?"

"He wanted to be everyone's villain. And - you want to be everyone's worry doll."

"What's wrong with that?"

She opens her mouth; she closes it.

Not long ago, the Hyuuga and Akimichi Clans were invited to a feast and a ball at New Kumogakure, celebrating the opening of the rebuilt city, which had been mostly destroyed during the Fourth War. The new city was built on top of the old. The ruins and structures were pushed down and melded with the Limestone Release, providing a base for a taller Kumo shining at the top of the mountains.

"It's-"

Hinata blinks, biting her lips. Naruto is glaring at her. He never glares at her. He only glares at enemies before he's forgiven him. She doesn't want to be forgiven. She doesn't want to have to be forgiven.

Kurama watches from inside, not even pretending to sleep, unblinking.

"I don't know," she admits.

"Think on it, a little."

During the feast, speeches were given. She publicly forgave the Fourth Raikage for her attempted kidnapping all those years ago, declaring - and this is still quoted, regularly, in newspapers distributed in the Land of Lightning - that, _"the era of hatred is passing. If we continue to fight, to condemn, what would happen to our dead brethren? What would their sacrifices mean? The Village System was created with Peace in mind, as the final goal. Therefore, every death since then has been for the sake of peace. If we do not take this chance, now, in this moment and every moment hereafter, to attain peace, then what happens to the memories of our comrades, our friends and lovers and family members, who died in the name of peace? Forgiveness is the only way forward."_

Naruto blinks, sighs, waiting for her response. A satellite twinkles in the night sky, unnoticed, unthought of. It was the first of it's kind, shot into space from Hozuki Island, transported there by sailors from the Land of Sea, built in the Land of Waves by scientists from Otogakure and engineers from Amegakure, out of metals scoured from the Land of Iron by migrant workers from the Land of Rice Paddies protected by shinobi from Iwagakure and funded by investors from the Wind Capitol. It blew out almost instantly, losing power after just one revolution. Still, it circles, passing by.

"I don't know," she says, again, wanting to just go away, to curl in the hole of a pin-head, to hibernate in a snowy cave for three hundred years, or to sever her tendons and ligaments with a rusty kunai and then bleed out in the Forest of Death, "I don't know what's wrong with it. I'm telling you I don't know."

"Hinata. C'mon. Just - it's fine."

 _Forgiveness is the only way forward._ These are words she spoke and meant. She felt truth burning in her guts as she spoke them. Yet, now, what of her own personal darknesses? Hatred, grudges, unspoken pain, these things burn like Amaterasu, never-ending, until everything is devoured. Often, what we say, declarations we make, vows we tie, preempt actual personal change. All of us, during transitions, are momentary hypocrites.

She flares.

" _Naruto_ , what happens when you die? Where will everyone's pain go, then, if you carried it all yourself?"

Unfolding his arms, chewing the inside of his lower lip, he keeps waiting. Kurama, within him, falls back asleep.

"You can't just do it all yourself," she continues, quickening, strained, "You have comrades that can help you. Shikamaru, Sakura. They'll be able to help you lead Konoha and the Alliance into an era of peace. Otherwise, you'd just become what Sasuke wanted to be - a dictator. Only, instead of people fearing you, they'd adore you. They'd follow you blindly. And then what? What happens then, when you pass on? What I said before was true, Naruto. You're the only truly good person in this world, right now. We all believe in you! That's why you need to let us carry our own burdens, too, so that you can keep being good, so you won't get so tired."

"Hin-"

"I don't - I want to - I want to have a life with you."

Naruto stares at her. The street is empty. Everyone has gone inside or further down. Only the music of the clubs still permeates the night air, something festive happening out of sight.

"And - I _don'_ t want you to - to become someone else. I don't want to see you crushed by the weight of all this, this world, this violent, shitty world."

He watches her. She looks like a ceramic statue coming to life, pottery cracking down the middle, becoming something perfect and sleek and new.

"I want it to just be us."

He watches her. A long silence passes. The street-lamps glow red and blue. The icy asphalt and concrete gleams with their reflection.

"I want it to just be us, now."

"I can't do that."

"I know."

"I can't be that selfish."

She closes her eyes; it stings to look.

"I'm a shinobi, still. Even despite all the pain that brings."

She looks at the ground. Her lavender boots. Her red, cold knees. Why did she wear shorts, tonight. It was dumb. She almost laughs.

"And," he continues, looking up, watching the tiny satellite vanish behind unlit clouds, "Shinobi are those who endure."

She laughs, cold, wintry, visible breath, "That's your famous quote."

"You have one, too, Hinata."

She stares at her hands. Her mittens. Wool. _Someone sheered a sheep, probably, for this_ , she thinks, absently, from a distance.

"Forgiveness is the only way forward, yahknow. Th-that's not the exact quote, I guess, yahknow. Hehe."

She stares at her wrists, visible between the hem of the mittens and the hem of the parka. Like bone. So pale and sudden the jut of her wrist-joints are, pressing against her skin like something trying to escape.

"I know you believe that, what you said before."

She looks at him, shaking her head. A sadness flickers in his expression, like a passing pale shadow, like a truth zipped up and packaged to look like an untruth. _That is what we hide behind_ , she thinks, _as shinobi, untruths, untruths instead of lies_.

"When I said it, I - I knew I was lying."

"No, you weren't."

"I was."

"Am I lying, then? Neji once told me that the Byakugan reveals lies - or maybe he said - I can't remember exactly; it doesn't matter, I guess, yahknow," he says, stumbling; she smiles slightly, as if trying to pry open a sliver of light; he coughs, keeps talking, "Tell me, am I lying? When I say that you weren't lying and that you believed your own words, that forgiveness is the only way forward - am I lying?"

She folds her hands, letting them hang.

Sakura would pinch him and say something like 'don't tell me what I am, dummy.' Ino would laugh in his face, shutting him out of her mind. Tenten would banter, tying it all up in a series of skits and jokes. Hanabi would change the subject, flirt with him abruptly and without caution. And, Kurenai would glare at him, maybe insult him, go home, drink brandy, and think about it all night before showing up at his apartment the next morning, early, without calling.

It hurts to be told who we are; however, pain gives way to growth - she knows this well. Proven by her scabbed calloused palms, her blood soaked into the tree stumps in the training grounds, and her subsequent promotions in rank, her heroic actions during the war. Proven, again, by each scarf she sewed, long and red and woolen, torn apart by Toneri, her rapist, and his blood on her fingers when she ripped out his eyes: she helped save the world. This is the cycle of pain and growth, just as permanent as the cycle of hatred and violence.

She thinks of her mother. Ageless even before death. Eyeless and a prophet. The last survivor of the Moon Wars. The kindest person ever known. Never brought to tears, never brought to violence, never brought to bigotry nor rage. She believed in other, lesser known cycles: the cycle of compassion and survival, the cycle of forgiveness and peace, the cycle gratitude and joy. Just like Naruto. Everything spirals in the direction chosen.

Closing her eyes, she exhales, "Fine."

Naruto smiles. Kurama chuckles in his sleep.

"Fine. Okay," Hinata reiterates, opening her eyes, letting the weight of her clan's history fall away from her like tapestry, "You're telling the truth."

Laughing with unfeigned relief, Naruto tugs at her wrists, pulling her in towards his warmth, his unfiltered light, his unassailable courage, "Besides, I don't even need food pills to fight for three days straight! I'll never get too tired to help everyone! With my Shadow Clones and Kurama, everything'll be great!"

Hinata stares up at him. His face is like a sun. His whiskers are sharp and protective, proof of his raw chakra. His eyes hide nothing from anyone; they are crystal balls. There's nothing she can say. The future is immediate and distant all at once. Often, always or usually, it is easier to just lean away, making the distance slightly longer.

"I hope you never change, Naruto."

He grins, laughing.

— — —

The pool balls clack and scatter, like a living mural, all the gleaming colors chasing each-other towards the pockets. Two fall in, as though fulfilling a myth, with joy, with triumph. Kiba groans from across the table.

"Sakura," Tenten says, laying the cue stick down on the rim, raising her arms outwards like wings, like a greeting, "Welcome to my domain."

Laughing, she replies, "Thank you, Tenten-dono. I feel so honored."

"That's right."

"I bet Tenten could be a Feudal Lord if she tried," Ino jokes, sipping a new drink called Thunder King. A concoction of lime juice, calcified lightning, and vodka. It zings her front teeth when she sips, bursting her thoughts apart like confetti. Sai rubs her back, dutifully.

"Yeah, Ten, you should be a Daimyo when you grow up."

"I'd have to own land for that," she half-quips, "But alas I don't even have a clan _naaaaaaaaame_."

They all laugh, sipping their drinks. Sakura - whiskey sour. Ino - Thunder King vodka cocktail. Tenten - pomegranate beer. Kiba - Black Earth label beer. Sai - tonic, a little gin.

Standing up from his slouching, Kiba grabs the cue stick from the rim of the table; then, he sets it back down again. He stares it down like an enemy.

"Maybe you could get Kaminaron to give you, like, a square foot, or something."

"A square foot?"

"Yeah. Just one though. One square foot of concrete."

"He'd charge me, probably, about 400,000 ryo a month, for that."

Everyone laughs with embittered, working class wisdom. Kiba flashes his teeth, his canines, like a devil's mouth.

"Oh! And I'd have to 'prove its utility,' or something," Tenten continues, in a tone mimicking Kaminaron, like a tongue made of velvet and metal, as if quoting from a document.

"That was a good Kaminaron," Sakura says, looking up from her whiskey, "He totally talks like that - like he's just reading from business contracts all the time."

"Do you think his friends call him Kami?"

Ino sputters with laughter, "Kami-chan?"

"Kami- _tan_."

They all laugh. Kiba picks the cue stick back up. Tenten raises an eyebrow, stretching her arms.

"Taking practice shots?"

"I'm winning, this time."

"You said that last time."

"Doesn't matter," Kiba says, chalking the cue, "Still winning. I'm gonna win, for sure."

"Aight, then," she says, surveying their other friends, as if choosing from a catalog, "Sakura, you want to play? You can take my spot."

"No, she can't."

"What the hell, dude," Ino says. Her face is bright pink from the drinking. Sai stands up a little straighter.

Grumbling, Kiba begins pulling the balls from the pockets, rolling them into a pile at the end of the table.

"It's fine, you guys play," Sakura says, waving her palm, "I'm just going to have one drink and go."

Groaning, Ino grabs her shoulders, shaking her like a caveman.

"Sakur _aaaa_ ," she pleads, her breath smelling like liquor, " _Forehead_ , c'mon, we never hang out anymore. You're so busy. Busy, busy, busy, busy, busy, busy - busy."

"I'm just busy," she says, sipping her whiskey, letting Ino nuzzle her collar-bone, watching Tenten and Kiba gather up all the pool balls, forming them into a triangle, pitch black eight-ball in the middle, lit by the amber lamp hanging above the table. It's like they're rebels, tucked away in a smoky, private den, amidst a swirl of maps and blueprints and whiskey.

She laughs once, sudden like a hiccup. Sai glances at her.

"You're so hard-working," Ino mutters, hair falling over her face like torn blonde fabric, "Did anyone die today?"

"Yeah," Sakura responds, blinking, noticing she's grinding her teeth, stopping, forgetting to keep stopping, continuing, "We had to unplug him."

"Old age?"

"He was in after a stroke. Went into a chakra coma. He wasn't really aware, really - just, his body wanted to keep living, I think, generally. His vital organs were all fine, working about as well as an aged shinobi's vitals could work. But, his chakra system was dying - the inner gates were wilting, his tenketsu points had stopped processing, the chakra veins were splintering, engorged in some places and worn away in others. His chakra stank really bad, like he was rotting from the inside out. It was just time, I guess. He probably exhausted himself too many times, on missions."

"Hmm, sad," Ino says, raising her head from Sakura's shoulder. Sai lingers between the girls and the pool table, watching Tenten and Kiba taking quick practice shots, finding their rhythms, rubbing blue chalk between their thumbs and forefingers.

"Yeah. It happens," Sakura replies, sipping, feeling entangled, "We just don't have enough beds, yet. There's all these new people in the city - which is, it's great, it's great, I'm not-"

"Yeah, of course."

"But, as a result - and so much funding is going towards the Clinic that now the _hospital_ is suffering. I don't know."

"We're going to save so many lives."

"I know."

Over the speakers, the song changes. A classic, goldies hit recently imported from the Land of Earth, called Two-by-Twos We Pop and Roll. Nobody knows who first wrote or performed it, but a little over three decades ago, just as the Second War was winding down, it began to appear at small town barn dances, speakeasies in the red-lights cities, and university gymnasiums in the Earth Capitol. At the time, it was considered social transgression. All these gyrating young people. Singers with their torn, purple voices. Speed, natural rhythm. Lyrics containing unabashed sexuality but still somehow based within suburban cleanliness, much like pin up drawings and dime novels.

It scared older folks, back then.

Nowadays, the old-timey hunk-dory four-piece pop music has been re-imagined by the modern, slash-and-scream fempunk bands of the Utatane District. These feel good tunes bare witness to a stronger, more feral, more consistent, more equal, depravity.

This particular cover is performed by a group known as What The What, Wolfgang Go Kill. They're best known for live performances. Three female singers so scandalously without instruments, waving their fists, stamping their bare feet, punching and slamming and smashing objects on stage, screaming and cat-calling and singing their voices raw, throwing - essentially and purposefully - artistic tantrums in front of audiences, backed by a well-dressed, hair-gelled, straight-laced big band with all the shining saxophones, trumpets, tubas, bassoons and trombones. A drummer in the way back, playing softly, using brush sticks, taking the role of conductor. A pianist on the side, tinkling away, sometimes given the spotlight, a solo piece, dainty and fragile and normal. Once, they brought a harpist on stage. The three lead singers thrashed about silently while the harpist played a slow, somber, lyric-less love song.

In the bar, dancing, people start pairing up, doing The Twist - ironically, at first, but soon they become seduced by the stunning sexuality of it. Faces looking up, at belt level. Asses pressing against skirts, jeans, leather pants. Clear visions down the inside of shirts, dresses. Then, juxtaposition. Return to height. Like a tease. Like a small town scandal. There is something incredibly transgressive about monogamy in a dance hall. Staring into your partner's eyes while you let them peak at you, while you gyrate and go and up and down, while you peak at them, too.

Even in the 'old days,' they realize, people still liked to seek pleasure and touch and kiss and go home with strangers. Someone in the crowd howls like a wolf. Someone else laughs, cackling like a madman. _"Our parents were orphans, too,"_ someone declares, like a call to action.

Noticing Sai tapping his foot, Sakura grins into her drink. The whiskey scent perforates her high. Sudden, obtrusive urges race through her body.

"Look," she whispers to Ino, pointing with discretion. Grinning, she sends a thought to Sai.

" _They sell records like this at that place across the street from our flower shop"_

" _The Raiton Fetus?"_

" _Yep."_

" _It would be good to paint, tomorrow, while listening to this."_

" _We'll go after breakfast."_

Tenten shoots, breaking. The balls scatter like cockroaches in a suddenly lit room. One of them lands in a random pocket. Grinning, she wipes her forehead with her sleeve and peers inside to find out whether she is stripes or solids.

"Solids," she shouts to Kiba, her fore-teeth glinting.

"Me?"

"You!"

He swears. Tenten laughs. Sai laughs. Ino laughs. Sakura smiles to herself, sipping.

— — —

"I want to know you, better, too, you know," Hinata says, catching his glance. He blinks, smiles. The street-lamps gleam red and blue. The sky is dark and unpopulated, lit by the thick slice of moon. They're leaning against a wall of white brick, ivy and graffiti, pressing shoulder to shoulder. Atop the wall, their drinks still sit. A beer and a cocktail. Frosted with snow and ice. The tiny parasol. The thin black straw.

"Really?"

"Yes!" she says, standing taller - he smiles like tanned leather - and she begins counting, "Kurama-kun. The Sixth. Sakura, Shikamaru, uh - Killer Bee, and Kazekage-sama, and Tsunade-sama, Iruka-sensei, um, Sai, Konohamaru, um…"

"What are you doing?"

"It's everyone who knows you better than I do! Um - Lee. Choji. Kiba. Maybe. Um - Captain Yamato. Um."

"Hey, hey, that's too many, now."

"Aoba was on Lion Turtle Island with you, for all that time. So was Guy-sensei. And that owl guy from Kumogakure."

"I was mostly training…"

"Or - all the Toads on Mountain Myoboku! What were their names? Gama-something?"

"Well - there's a lot of them, yeah. Gamabunta. Gamkichi. Gamatatsu. Ma and Pa. Um - lots more, really."

"I bet Yakushi Kabuto knows you even better than me, too."

"C'mon, now, yahknow."

"The Fourth Raikage, Pakkun, that bridge builder from, from Waves, and his grandson named after food, um-"

"Now you're just underestimating yourself. I mean, we went to the Academy together, for years, since we were like five."

"Yeah."

"We're in the Konoha Eleven, together, too."

Nodding, she searches for a refutation.

"And then - the past couple years. You helped me, after the war, when I was getting used to having one arm. Then, I mean-"

"Oh - and Ichiraku! The father and daughter at Ichiraku Ramen!"

"Teuchi and Ayame, yeah."

"The point is, everyone knows you so well, Naruto," she says, holding his bandaged fingers, enjoying making him squirm, "We all saw what - we all saw your memories, in the war, because of Ino's ability, and-"

"It wasn't everything."

"I know. And-"

"Sorry I keep interrupting you," he mumbles. She almost laughs. A wind blows, downwards from above, rushing past the chain-link fence, making it rattle. She presses closer against him, hoarding his warmth.

"And, I want to - I feel envious of them," she admits, blushing pink from the cold and the truth, "And of Sasuke."

"Sasuke?"

"He knows you best, right? Better than everyone."

Naruto doesn't know how to respond. He thinks of his parents, like a passing image, and the knot of their memory begins to unravel, but he is tired and feels a churning sensation, like he is on a boat at sea. His father's face stares out from the Monument, partially hidden behind construction projects, cranes and scaffolding, skeletons of towers, malls, tenements, and office buildings.

"Yeah. Yeah I guess he does. Besides probably Kurama."

"You love - or, well."

"Not like _that_ ," he laughs, small and measly, uncertain, "He's my brother, you know."

She raises an eyebrow, her Byakugan flexing. Naruto blushes a little, but he doesn't look away.

"I've - the whole world saw your memories, Naruto. Not every memory, and we saw them all at once. It was messy and - chaotic. It was hard to see it all because - But I've tried my best to remember everything! I tried to pull apart the - my memories of _your_ memories and see them as individually as possible. I kept a journal of it because I wanted to write everything down in chronological order."

"That's - amazing, yahknow."

"How many times, do you think - how often did Sasuke inspire you to keep living, and working, and training? Again and again. Even on Team 8, none of us were _that_ close. I mean, I don't know, Shino and Kiba will always know me in ways that - but I mean - none of us are like _that_."

"Yeah, yeah we were really close. We are, still. And not 'cause of Ashura and Indra. Just - I don't know, really - well, I do… We share the same pain," Naruto admits, staring off at the street, the ice and the falling snow, the frosty windows looking in on pubs, all the people inside look like moving masses of dark matter. He laughs at all the alliteration.

Watching his contentment, his unfiltered honesty, she smiles, a tease forming on her tongue, "And," she giggles, feeling audacious, "He was your first kiss."

"Heheh," he blushes.

Pressing her temple against his shoulder, as if posing for a photograph, as if they are in a park on a bench in the springtime, she closes her eyes. Above them, a cloud passes over the moon. The light changes, becoming entirely electric and forgiving.

"But, you inspired me too, yahknow," he claims, aware of his body as he breathes, her form against his, somehow fitting without misalignment.

"When was that?"

"At the Chunin Exams! Before the final tournament. And in the pre-lims, too, when I watched you fight. I realized how strong you were, then. Your willpower and ferocity. And then - during Pain's Invasion, too. Later on, during the war. Then on our last mission together… You've inspired me then more than, more than anyone ever has, I think, probably."

"You're just easily inspired, though."

"Heheh, sorry."

"No! It's a good thing, I'm just - I don't think I can live up to him," she admits, relaxing, feeling Naruto's chakra and body reacting, "I don't know Sasuke at all, really, but I don't think I can live up to him. I just don't think I can."

He stares at the cement and their shoes, frowning like an infinity symbol, unsure how to respond.

"Well - I don't know," she says, huddling closer to him.

"You've always powered through doubt, though," he replies, feeling her head shifting against his collar-bone, "Whenever you've been faced with adversity, you've always just kept pushing. So, when you say things like 'I can't' I just don't really believe you. Because, I know that's not you. You know?"

The street-lamps glow. A distant wind howls against her silence.

"I just - I know you well enough to know that I want to know you even better," he says, tripping on his own tongue.

She laughs; he laughs.

"Me too."

"And, I know - at your core, there's willpower and compassion and - and, all those good things. We're just - just - the madness of the shinobi system, it ate us all up, you know?"

He feels her nodding.

"And - I guess what I'm saying is… I guess I'm saying that it's okay to let me take away your burdens if, you know," he exhales, glancing upwards, confirming that the moon is still obscured, "If you can take mine, yahknow."

Down the street, a lamp turns on; it's green.

"Of course. Of course I will," she replies, grinning into his scarf, her guts burning with white fire, "The Hyuuga generally don't think about anything but their own interests, though."

Naruto blinks, raising an eyebrow.

"But - I don't think I want to be a Hyuuga anymore, anyways."

He laughs, ignorant of her implication, "We could go to the Hokage's Office tomorrow and, like, re-register you under a new name, yahknow!"

She raises her head from his parka, her laughter spiraling out like red yarn. She laughs until she is pink in the face, her cheeks hurting, her lungs straining.

"Hey, hey, take it easy," he jokes, pulling away from her grasp.

"Sorry, sorry," she says, taking off her left mitten to wipe away the tears, "Let's go home."

"Should we say goodbye to everyone inside?"

She shakes her head, her long dark hair rustling like a blackberry bush, "If just for tonight - I want it to just be us."

Leaving their drinks atop the wall, they link arms as if imitating their grandparents. Chivalry and manners and polite society. As they walk together into the street, down Pub Row, music from the clubs reverberates against the quiet of winter, the falling snow, the muffled concrete and windless air. It is a long and moonless walk back home, to Naruto's apartment in the Uzumaki Corridor.

— — —

Tenten, then Kiba; Tenten, then Kiba; Tenten, then Kiba. Like a series of jousts, the game unfolds. Pool balls cackling around the green velvet battlefield. Pockets sneering within their emptinesses. Tenten, then Kiba. Tenten, then Kiba. They wears armors of sweat. Their pikes are cue sticks. Their fingers blue from chalk.

Sai, enraptured, takes it in, watching from the sidelines, clutching the rim of the table, his pale white face glowing like radiation from the bar-light. He could be a wax figure in a museum.

Over the speakers, the music ceases to make sense, becoming garbles, noises, languages and rhythms. People dance. People drink, flirt, joke, curse and kiss. Like a big writhing animal in the middle of the pub. Bartenders with their sweat, their fine clothes, their speedy flirtations and transactions, a circus of glasses, bottles, ice, and change glinting, clinking, shimmering.

Doors swinging open, closed, open then closed. Ceiling fans turning slowly and bored. Outside, the street shines with red and blue lanterns reflecting in the icy asphalt and the frosty windows. Something smells like pot. Something smells like sweat, liquor, and burnt matches. This is the Utatane District at midnight. This is Sheep's, the 'most respectable bar nearby,' as their motto so brazenly states, in swinging cursive letters, written above the front door.

Sakura blinks, finding a beer in her hand. Brown and foamy, with the texture of cashmere. She takes a sip; she chews; it tastes like pulp, prunes, crushed pinecones, and rude, rambunctious coffee.

When did everything become like this? This way we are, somehow. In our twenties and still alive. Unsure if we've always been twenty or maybe we were once children, adolescents, and even - maybe - babies, toddlers, fetuses and unborn. An egg. A premonition. A possible future. But now we are so very now. Caught within the lives we live, plateauing, noticing - for the first time, perhaps - that the rest of this is a long, flat landscape arching towards the most narrow horizon-line, and the ground is made of red clay, limestone and fields of tall yellow grass. Where are all the oxen, boulders and abandoned silos with winking tin caps? Where is the populace? In the Utatane District, something says, something silver and purple and frictionless in our brain matter, the dullish meat inside our skulls.

Sakura blinks, laughing. She's sitting. When did she sit? She's sitting in a chair. The chair is warm, someone else had been sitting here just moments ago. It is a tall, stoolish chair. She sets her beer down on the table. There is a table. It is probably made of cedar, varnished dark, full of initials and phalluses scratched into the wood, a graveyard of abc gum underneath. Where are the coasters? She has coasters at home, but her surfaces are still dotted with rings of coffee, rosé wine and orange juice.

 _This song is amazing_ , someone says, laughing. The person sitting across from her. There is a glass of blue, glowing liquid. It smells like healthy chakra. It pulses like a speaker. Sakura laughs like sudden tap water. Ino looks like a canary. Her bright yellow hair, combed and brushed and stylized. Her violet skirt and top, zipped into tightness, into curvaceousness, into routine audacity. Her midriff, glistening with sweat. Her abs and bellybutton. Always, she sucks her thin but infallible stomach fat in.

 _She is beautiful_ , Sakura thinks or says. Ino laughs, agreeing.

It's funny how beautiful she is. Like foreigners. Blue and bright and pale and pink. Like winter in a pine forest, in the late cloudless morning. It reminds her - Sakura - of a country Sasuke once told her about, a long time ago or not that long ago, when he was last in town or the time before or the time before that. He has been in town before, again, once or twice or several times. Always it is like that, 'he was in town before,' 'the last time he was in town, before,' 'before, when he was last in town.' These are things she says with relative regularity, usually at the beginnings and ends of months.

But she cannot recall the name of the country he told her about. All she remembers is that it has pineapples, which she has never tasted nor seen, and also bananas, which she has both tasted and seen. There is a lot of sunlight, he said or she remembers him saying. All the plants are big and green, he might've also said.

She sips, laughs. Her laugh is unangry and loveless. It is just a laugh. It is a good laugh.

The way he tells her things. Sasuke. In his dark, narrow voice. Prone to first silence, then philosophizing, and then silence again. Small talk is burdensome, to him. Seemingly more difficult to wield than orphanhood and attempted regicide. He never tells her anything, really. He forgets to frame the things he says. He forgets to provide context in stories, arguments, compliments and silences. He doesn't understand normal human manners. It is erotic, the way he doesn't understand. It is erotic, the way he disregards and insults - on purpose or by accident, either way she squirms.

She sips, laughs, laughs, sets down her beer. It sits there grinning at her.

"Okay, fine, I'll bite," Ino says, shrugging Sai out of her mind, turning all her attention onto Sakura, like a beacon, like a lighthouse beam searching for a boat on darkened waters of a bay - it is nighttime but everything is well lit.

"Hmm?"

"What's up? Why're you like this right now?"

"I don't know," Sakura responds, squeezing her beer, letting it sit still on the table within her grip.

Ino waits. Someone laughs. Someone applauds.

"Everything in my apartment," Sakura says, staring into the beer, brown and foamy, her thoughts twisting, turning, leaping and stuttering - even though she lacks their eloquence, she decides to try and speak like her favorite male authors, "It just feels so motionless, sometimes. I have skylights. And in the afternoons, in the winter, everything is gray and light, and the light is always so motionless. I don't know. My counters, cupboards - the coffee tables, have such defined and sharp edges sometimes. I hate the sound the stoves make when I turn them on - the flickering thing, the ring of blue fire hiccuping into life. Sometimes I like it though because it makes me feel like a sufficient young adult. I don't know, really. My pots and pans are unclean. Burnt eggs and - burnt noodles. My sink is full of dishes. They say the kitchen sink is the most normal thing there is, or something. All that metal. The black, deep drain. The sounds the water makes when it goes through the pipes, like an unhealthy digestive tract. I don't know what I'm saying, beyond that. It felt like I had something good to say, but now I just feel dragged on, like I'm dragging, just - I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what I'm channeling, right now."

"You don't sound like yourself."

"I know. I can't, lately. I can't sound like myself, lately. I try really hard to do it, to sound like myself, but I just can't, lately."

Searching through Sakura's mind, Ino locates the red flag, the symptom that informs her of the diagnosis. Amidst the lights and colors and flickering frames of Sakura's thoughts, Ino finds a certain static screen. It does not waver nor reduce. It only continues, glowering behind everything out front, covering up everything in back. If left to fester, it will grow, eating away at the subconscious, ambitions, and even basic carnal needs. This is a common problem, that can easily become an incurable disease of the mind, found in almost every high-ranking shinobi.

Pursing her lips, she thinks of the right words.

"Slow down and take a breath, okay? Just - let it be. You're on too many _food pills_ , girl," she says, rabbit-earing the terms food pills. Parents, teachers, and squad leaders called them that back then, back when they were kids. In the Academy, then in the Exams and early combat missions.

Food pills were a necessity. Children don't have the chakra to fight for several days, to stay awake during long missions. Calling them that is a good way to make sure the little child soldiers take them. Food pills have other names, of course. Speed is the most common terms among citizens. Methamphetamine is the scientific version. Meth is the most visceral.

This is surely the Akimichi Clan's greatest sin.

In the war, abuse of food pills was a massive problem. Several shinobi overdosed. Many more took them too early and came down in the middle of combat. Yet, they were considered a tier-one ration. All shinobi were expected to take this supplement. They needed to. They couldn't have fought for two straight days without it, in so many consecutive battles, moving entire regiments across Lands in a matter of hours. It would have been impossible without food pills.

Yet, the side effects, the addictions, the overdoses. Almost all retired or disabled veterans suffer from food pill addiction. It is something the new Clinic plans to address as soon as possible. To eradicate this epidemic, they need to sever ties with businesses that produce food pills, as well as relieve economic stress in the locales of highest abuse and find ways to properly medicate PTSD and other mental ailments that most often result in food pill addiction.

Ino knows this is a critical moment in their Clinic's early history and in their own personal lives.

"I need them," Sakura claims, something shriveling in her thoughts, "To - to keep doing all this. Working like this. Pushing. The hospital and everything."

"You're the hardest worker in Konoha, obviously," Ino says, patting her hand, half-joking, "Except Lee, maybe. But that's different. He's - well, it doesn't matter. How many lives did you save today?"

Sakura shakes her head. Ino pats her cheek like a mafioso.

"Listen, just - just take it easy, you know? You're working too hard. But - you're also, you're doing this you thing you do. This, like - where you try and be like Naruto. Stop trying to be like Naruto and Sasuke."

"What?"

"You're trying to shoulder everyone's burdens. But that's - that's you and it's not you. You have to just - you have to learn how to do it without the extra help, you know?"

Sakura blinks; she looks like a confused animal.

"Fuck," Ino states, rubbing her forehead, everyone's thoughts passing through her brain, "I'm too drunk for this, right now. Get a clear head, Sakura. Hang out tonight. Drink too much. Tomorrow, it'll be better. But - give me what you have on you."

"You'll just take them yourself."

"The Yamanaka don't mess with those much because we need to have clear heads."

"Then, Sai will."

"The Foundation forbade food pills because of the same reason. C'mon."

From her bag, Sakura pulls out the breath mints tin. She hands it over without a thought, as if trying to prove her own autonomy.

"Good," Ino says, sighing with relief, holding it in her fist because her skirt has no pockets, "Good, Sakura. Thanks. It'll be okay."

Chuckling with slight derision, as a method of defense, Sakura sips her beer. It feels good. She feels weightless. She wonders if Sasuke has an addiction to food pills. Probably not, she reasons. Although, Otogakure was known for using steroids and other drugs on their child soldiers. But, no - Sasuke is too level-headed for that, too puritanical. He doesn't drink alcohol; he doesn't smoke anything; he practices abstinence from sex and masterbation; he doesn't eat meat; sometimes, every few months, he even fasts, drinking only water before sun-up and after sun-down. All that guilt of his. He never fully leaves her thoughts. He is like a tattoo, painful and beautiful and permanent and full of consequences. But - for now, for tonight - he is minimized, diminished, something ashy and distant.

Within the new feeling of space, Sakura laughs, drinks, finishing her beer before Ino can declare a cheers.


	7. Chapter 7

Pub Row is quiet with winter. Windless and full of concrete, frost and glowing street-lamps. They walk together up the incline, arms linked, towards the top of the hill where the Kahyo Arch rises, pressing against the city like a declaration, like a rebuttal.

It is a mossy green arch, made of pinewood, one of the last standing motifs from the early days of the Village Hidden in the Leaves. It survived several destructions: the Uchiha Rebellion during the ceasefire of the First War, the Kusa-Taki Invasion of the Second War, the Kyuubi rampages of the Third War ending with the fateful night of the Kyuubi Attack, the Suna-Oto joint invasion known colloquially as Konoha Crush, Pain's Invasion now known as The Incident, the Zetsu-Edo Invasion during the Fourth War, and, most recently, the Night the Moon Fell.

Konoha is a stubborn thing. It survives, growing stronger and larger and taller as the generations pass. When the Village was first built, it was made of wood and tin. The Clans lived in their ancestral locations, using the Village as simply a meeting point. As time passed, everyone moved closer together, like migration. They built the walls. The gates. The Monument. Now, there is concrete, steel and asphalt. Plans to build towers. Plans to build trains. The Kahyo Arch represents that. An unwavering thing. A steadfast thing.

It was re-named for a kunoichi. For decades, the arch bared no official name. It was known as the Green Arch. Or, the entrance gate to the Stadium. Or, the First Gate. Or, the Main Gate. After Kaminaron purchased it, he named it after a young kunoichi named Kahyo Emiru who suffered a fate worse than death during a Chunin Exams many years ago. It was the last time the Village of Hidden Oaks participated in the Leaf-held Exams. Rumor has it that Danzo and the Foundation eradicated their Village, killing off the last of their shinobi during an ambush only a few years ago.

"Did you know Emiru," Naruto asks when they pass underneath the gate, stepping under its shadow, arm in arm. She presses closer to him, feeling like a foreigner. This gate represents something new to her, ever since the moon. Its a shared pain, now, that she has with the gate's namesake. They are like sisters of pain. At night, when she wakes up from troubled dreams involving Toneri, she sometimes sees Emiru in the bed with her. They are both twelve, then. Emiru is always asleep during these visions, curled up like a little doe. But she is perpetually twelve. Even if she had survived, she would be perpetually twelve. That is what happens when you experience your first trauma. Some part of you never ages past that point. That is another thing rapists, among other evil people, take from us. They take our adulthood. They take our childhood. The are like world-eaters.

She shakes her head, "No. I never knew her. I never met her."

"Me neither," Naruto responds, rubbing the back of his head just to feel the texture of his hair in the cold, "Ino says they met, though, once. She said Emiru was buying flowers at the shop, for one of her teammates in the hospital. I guess on one of their first missions, they had to capture a rampaging bull, and one of her teammates got gored. So - she went to the flower shop to buy flowers to put at his bedside, or something. She was there with the other one, too - I forget his name - the one Ibiki interrogated after everything happened, the one they sent to the Blood Prison."

His voice trails off into the snowy winter, as they pass through to the other side of the gate, continuing the up-hill trudge. Glancing over his shoulder, he watches the shadow of the gate, as the street-lamps meet their match against its solidity. In the air, something whistles like a silver braying goat. The wind, maybe - it sounds mournful.

Hinata coughs.

"I heard she never wanted to be a shinobi."

Naruto sighs, looking upwards. The sky is dark and empty. Full of black clouds and the vague yellow haze of city lights. It feels like they are walking in slow-motion. As if under the spell of carbon monoxide. It would be nice - he thinks - to control time. To be able to slow down the good moments and speed up the bad. But, no - he shakes his head - that is not his nindo. Nagato was a little bit right. Pain is important. Pain is necessary. We must feel and accept pain in order to grow.

"I wish I could do something for her. I wish - sometimes I get angry at the Third. I know I shouldn't. But - sometimes I get so mad at him."

She shakes her head, "Its nothing. Its what it is."

"Its not _nothing_. How could it be nothing?"

"I mean - of course its not nothing."

"Yeah."

"Its not nothing."

The helm of their argument stops just inches from the dividing line. He is in the right, this time. His idealism is always in the right. It is the light of everything. But - she is tired. She is tired and it is night and winter and the city is quiet and busy and soon they will be home, at his apartment, and she can lie down in his bed and fall asleep and then it will be tomorrow.

As they walk, trudging upwards, the buildings become apartments. Yellow boxes of light, stacked in columns and rows. The glow of television sets. The rumor of music playing behind drawn curtains. A hint of laughter. Someone arguing with themselves. Steam rising from ventilation shafts on top of roofs. People sitting on stoops, porches, and patios, smoking, the glowing orange tips of their cigarettes floating in the darkness like fireflies. They watch - the smokers. Like crows upon a wire. They watch from their nests, their outposts, the happy couple walking below them, up the hill, towards the embankment, where the city levels out and the streets flatten with relief.

"That was Sai's year, did you know? That was the year Sai became a Chunin."

"Wow."

"Yeah."

A toad croaks somewhere. Naruto almost laughs. She feels him bristling. She tightens her grip on his arm, pressing a little closer, as if she could absorb his good nature and make it her own. Maybe she can, she thinks. For as long as she remembers, she's wanted to be like him. To become him. Maybe that is actual love.

"She was hardly even twelve," Hinata says, her breath like frost, "Just a girl."

Naruto doesn't say anything. Their footsteps crunch on the snow.

"Emiru," Hinata says, "It could have happened to any of us, like that, you know."

"Yeah."

"Those Oto-nin. I heard about what happened, in the Forest of Death. If Lee hadn't shown up, they probably would have done the same to Sakura, and-"

"That was a long time ago, now," he says, blinking at his own lie.

"Was it?"

"Mhmm."

"Oh."

A porch-light turns off, as if the lamp ran out of kerosene in that very moment. It began as a dimming, the embers turning red, swallowing up into itself before it became black and cold. A cat leaps from the railing, disappearing under the deck, leaving behind just the noise of rustling leaves. Then, the leaves stop making sound, too. They become still.

"I don't know. It wasn't. It wasn't long ago. Nothing is ever long ago, right?"

She looks up at him. His jaw, his pale blue eyes. What if he had become a troubled, somber person? He could have. He could have become lazy, irritable, and neglectful - or even sadistic. He could have become like Toneri. So alone, they both were, reveling inside their loneliness. She shivers.

"What happened?" he says, grinning all of a sudden, turning to her, "We were so happy a second ago."

She smiles.

"That's what the Kahyo Arch does to people, who know about it," she says, "It just makes them unhappy. Then, they drink more at the bars down the hill. Maybe its a conspiracy."

"Heh. Yeah."

"Let's keep walking. I want to be happy, right now."

"Me too."

Holding their arms tighter, they keep walking, pushing up to the plateau of the hill and the city levels out like a rusty iron fan spreading open before them.

— — —

"Sai! You knew Emiru-chan, right?"

"A little."

The bartender arrives - _"Toro!"_ Sakura exclaims in rosy, drunken joy- carrying a black tray full of drinks. He is like a ghost, setting the drinks down on the table, unseen, unheard, unreactive. Bartenders are shinobi, too, in a way. Waiters, servers, and valets - they are all shinobi. Doormen and chauffeurs, housekeepers and concierges - all shinobi. Masters of stealth and disguise and diplomacy.

"Weren't you in the same Academy class, or something?"

He sets a beer down in front of Kiba. It is dark, foamy. It smells like charcoal. Kiba stares straight ahead, willing himself not to notice it there, willing himself not to overhear the conversation.

"I graduated early," Sai says quietly, folding his hands in front of him like a house, "We did take the Chunin Exams together, although we were on separate teams."

Toro sets a gin-and-tonic down on the table in front of Sai's pale hands. He twitches, then glances up at the man, his beard, his black-framed glasses. Toro flickers his lips at him, as if in greeting. Sai nods and takes the glass up, studying its contents and sets it back down on the little paper napkin.

"Did it really happen like they say it did?"

"I wasn't there."

Toro sets a reddish, salt-lined drink down in front of Ino. It smells like spice and fire. Pomegranate slice perched upon the rim of the glass.

"It was worse than they say!" she spouts, almost knocking her drink over, "I know because my dad read her teammate's mind, after!"

"The one they sent to Hozuki Castle?"

"Yep!"

Toro sets a beer down in front of Tenten. It smells like rainwater and tempest. The glass is cloudy and dark blue.

"Wow."

He sets a whiskey-sour down in front of Sakura; she takes it straight from his hand, touching his knuckles with her fingernails. He almost recoils, but instead just smiles, whirling away, folding the empty black tray under his arm as he departs - _"Thanks, Toro!"_ she calls after him, and he waves a hand over his back like some heroic cowboy leaving town before sunset. Laughing, she takes a sip. It tastes like sticky Greek fire.

"Yep."

"So - what really happened?"

Ino glances at each of her friends in turn, a vague smile in her drunken face, a certain seduction in the way she looks at them, almost imperious, as though reveling in a ghost story around a campfire - then, she blinks, frowns.

"Maybe - maybe it would be wrong to tell. Its not my story to tell, really. Its just not. Maybe - maybe its wrong to - to broadcast everybody's pain and struggles to the public without regard for how they may feel about things. Maybe its okay for there to still be secrets, even in the modern era. I don't know. I mean - who should control the narrative, you know? Me? Some random kunoichi who had nothing to do with Emiru and what happened? Of course not. No - of course not."

They all stare at her. Sai smiles, picking up his gin, taking a sip, grimacing. Shrugging, Sakura slugs her drink and begins to laugh.

— — —

While they walk, their clasped hands become warm. Like two tulips unfolding, morphing into semblances of each-other. Marriage is like being a conjoined twin, maybe, he wonders, smiling something small and complete. For years, his life was a maze of loneliness. Now, he has reached the light at the end of the maze. The balcony overlooking the ocean, the tide, the starry dark skies.

He has always shared a mind with another consciousness. This closeness is automatic, assumed. It would be strange, he thinks, to be completely alone. In this way, he is prepared for marriage. The telepathy of spouses. The utter truths. Being unable to hide. This goes against most shinobi wisdom. Shinobi are liars, deceivers, manipulators and shadow-dwellers. But spouses are the opposite of those things. This must prove that being a shinobi goes against basic human concept. Yet, we cannot help but be shinobi. We are beholden to it. We are always shinobi. So - we must change the nature of shinobi. We must become new shinobi. A type of shinobi never before seen. This is the idea he has. The idea that nibbles at the edges of his thoughts. This idea that lounges someplace unlit, waiting for him. If only he could turn a few degrees closer, then he could see it, the whole thing, the whole future, his son and his daughter out there waiting for him. He images the Hokage Monument full of faces. A hundred, two hundred faces staring out at him.

"Did you want to be a shinobi, Hinata?"

The buildings cast shadows. The street-lamps illuminate those shadows, breaking those shadows apart like grenades of light. Something in the air smells like turpentine. Someone is painting in the dark. Through a window, she can see him there sitting on a step-ladder, painting the wall. The silhouette of a painter. Some part of her falls in love.

She shakes her head, no. "My father wanted me to be a shinobi. That's all. I had no choice."

Something softens in Naruto's eyes. The gravity of her standing next to him, walking beside him, sometimes astounds him. Like she is a planet of her own, and he simply revolves around her. When did this happen? When did she become so important? He thinks back. That torn red scarf lying in the snow. That final exam, full of her handwriting, formulas and mathematics, peeking out from past her elbow as she slyly showed him all the answers. That ointment she handed to him, in her shaking hands. No - it was when he saw her blood on the tiled floor of the preliminary tournament building. Her blood shined in puddles beneath Neji's sandals. She kept standing up. Again and again, she stood. They took her away, the medic-nin, wearing white; they took her away on a stretcher. She survived, leaving her blood shining on the tiled floor. He knelt down to touch it, to grasp hold of this piece of her, this body thing, and he held her in his fist and pointed it at Neji and made yet another promise. Maybe that was when it happened. Maybe that was when she became a planet with gravity.

"When I'm Hokage," he announces, walking a little straighter, "I'll make sure nobody has to be a shinobi if they don't want to be. That'll be a law."

She smiles at him. One day, she wants to have children, she decides. She has never wanted this before. After her mother died, when Hanabi was born, the idea of having children frightened her. Being ripped open. Someone walking out of your body. You are their egg. And they will crack you apart with their beak, and you will shatter when they become alive. But now - suddenly, in this moment - she feels capable. She laughs at herself. How silly. Maybe it would be okay to bring children into Naruto's version of the world. Smiling forward down the street, she lets herself feel a little hopeful. The snow is light, shallow. The pavement is hard against their boots. It feels good, the cold. The cold feels good when your hands are warm.

— — —

Her whiskey tastes like green tea. It shouldn't but it does. It does. She sips it, the ice head-butting her front teeth.

"Ow!"

Ino laughs. Her laugh is like New Years.

" _Bartender!"_ someone shouts from faraway within the noise of the pub. Tenten cackles like a lightning serpent. Her hair-buns frizz, coming undone. She remembers squeezing through the crowd earlier, and all those hands, the dancing drunk people and their hands. She keeps laughing. She misses Neji.

"I miss Neji," she proclaims. Kiba mutters something as if from behind a closed door.

"Kiba, what the fuck - I miss Neji," she tells him. He stares at her for a thousand years, in judgment, under analysis. Then - he laughs. He laughs like he's made of tiny blue devils. There is no joy in his laughter, but it is still laughter and it makes him feel good. Sai then laughs, too, like a wobbling glass bowl.

"Neji misses Neji, I bet," someone says. It doesn't really matter who.

Sakura stands up, like a tree in the forest realizing it has movement. She feels tall, naked, and clumsy - like a street-lamp that won't turn on - or maybe the only street-lamp turned on. The power-grid exploded, yet somehow one single street-lamp still burns in the city darkness. All the inhabitants of the city huddle in the tiny circle of light, for warmth, for safety, for companionship. She smiles. It feels good to be a life-boat. She'd rather be a life-boat than an iceberg, she thinks. Then, she realizes she is. She is a doctor instead of a killer. She is a medical-nin instead of an assassin. She is the peaceful, perfect future - and all her friends are just killers. She is drunk. She is high.

"Hahaha," she says, laying her right hand upon the back of a chair, to steady herself. Ino watches her as if from behind a one-way window in an interrogation room.

"I see you, Ino," Sakura says. Ino laughs. Her laugh is like Valentine's Day. Sai rubs her back with his bare palm. Her goose-pimples rise against the cold touch of his fingers.

Tenten laughs at them.

Her teeth feel whittled, almost down to the stumps. She licks her teeth, to check they're still there. They're still there; they taste like moss; she runs her tongue across the back-side of her lower row of teeth, just to feel the black texture of the plaque.

"Tenten," Sakura says, but she doesn't hear. Sakura blinks, wondering if maybe a ninja turned off all the sound in the world. Maybe they are being infiltrated right now, in this exact moment. She waits to feel afraid, but it never happens.

Blinking, standing taller than everyone in the bar - and Naruto used to be shorter than her - she realizes that in all her years of soldiership never once has she lost a tooth in a fight. All her child teeth fell out on their own, in moments of calm, peace. The last one fell out when she was trying to bring a muskrat back to life, while Tsunade was in the room. It fell into the fur and just lied there. That was the last one, she realizes, grinning like a kid. Tsunade never wanted her as an apprentice. Orochimaru wanted Sasuke. Jiraiya wanted Naruto. Tsunade never wanted anybody. Tsunade only wanted to be drunk and alone.

"Hahaha," she says.

No, but Ino is taller in heels. And Tenten is always taller. And usually the men are taller, somehow, than she is. Even when she wears heels. She doesn't like to wear heels, though.

"My hygiene has always been on point, for a child soldier," she announces, wobbling in place as if standing on a pair of stilts. Ino applauds her as if at the opera. Sai follows suit, applauding in the exact same way. Oh my God, Sakura realizes, Ino is turning him into a miniature version of herself. Adorable.

"Good girl," Tenten remarks, lounging like a mafioso in her chair. She looks like a capo. She would be a capo. Is she an arms dealer? Sakura opens her mouth to ask, but then stops, wondering if maybe it would be rude.

Kiba hands her a shot. She takes it, staring into the curious golden tube.

"Fuck the war, Sakura," he commands. She smiles like a feline. In her hands, she holds a time bomb, the blueprints of neo-tomorrow, the answer to each big question in life.

"Yeah, fuck the war," she agrees, lifting it to her lips in rebellion, throwing back her chin in revolt.

— — —

At night, in the residential neighborhoods, when the streets are empty, the city feels unoppressive and conscientious. There is something movie-like about city streets at night, in the winter, amidst the falling, lilting snow, passing through warm orange circles of light from the street-lamps.

You can hear music playing from inside peoples' homes. Jazz, then pop-fantasy, then eclectic barrio soundtracks. The diversity within peoples' tastes - and they all live so close to one another, able to smell each-other, hear each-other, through the walls and floors, a kind of city-wide and unspoken intimacy - entices a certain feeling of revolution. Like we are a part of something great and wide and new and free. We are a generation of thinkers, artists, and listeners with unbridled audacity. We are thought of as lazy and contemptuous and spoiled, privileged brats - but, really, we simply want what is right, noble and good so deeply and so badly that we are unafraid of being called lazy and contemptuous and spoiled, privileged brats. We are unable to compromise. Maybe this is ignoble. But at least it is true. The Konoha Eleven is the same way. They represent everything that went wrong with the Third's policies, with the eras of war and the generational traumas; while also carrying something new and good and made of light, a beacon towards whatever limpid future lies ahead, towards something slightly changed from the old days, a society crossing some threshold - by degrees - between "unjust" and "just." Then, they, too, will be called old-fashioned by their "lazy, contemptuous and spoiled, privileged brats."

But, for now, it is night and they are walking together down the street. Passing under the spotlight of a street-lamp, a circle of thick, orange light; they are momentarily lit and vulnerable, visible to all the creatures of night hiding away in dumpsters, alleys and around the corner.

"Its like a jailbreak," he quips, shading his eyes from the white street-light. She laughs, giggles, into her tiny fist.

Then, they melt back into the darkness on the other side. The city street. The concrete and smells of the city. Someone is frying lentils, with their window open, half past midnight. The air smells like oil and bunsen fire. Naruto laughs like a child laughing at his mistakes, something proud and victorious - then, his grin flickers; he looks at her, the way she smiles as if painted onto ceramic, as if crafted by a glassblower.

"Hey - sorry I always, like, make plans and stuff, yahknow," he says, glancing up and down the street, the block of lit windows, shuttered apartments, porches and potted plants. There is a cat watching them from a stoop, its yellow eyes gleaming in the darkness, something like a contented sneer in its glinting whiskers.

He doesn't know why, but it reminds him of Konan. He feels things he doesn't quite understand. In an odd way, he admires the Akatsuki. The original Akatsuki. The founding members who strove towards peace through non-violence. They were like he is - uncompromising in their values, wielding unconditional compassion. I will build a monument to them, one day, he decides. A statue in a park of an angel spreading her arms to the world below - that would be nice.

"Hm - what do you mean? You're really not much of a planner, Naruto."

He blinks. She is looking at him, watching him. Her Byakugan are opal and white, mirror-like. There is a small, pink curl to her lips because it is kind of cute when he loses focus.

"Huh? Oh - uh, I just keep making all these plans without you, you know? Without consulting you and stuff," he says, stumbling through the words, rubbing the back of his head with his free arm, "I mean - did you even want to go out, tonight?"

He laughs a little when he hears Sakura in his tone.

The cat on the porch bounds away, a dash of pale white fur, leaping into the shadowy brush and down the cobbled alley. Something smells like rain. A silver bell tinkles from someone's porch, a wind-chime. On a different porch, a pinwheel turns, glinting in the night. The wind is slow, stumbling as if drunken, swaying, lifting powdery snow from the sidewalk, like shallow dust-storms, then it all settles back down as if too tired to keep flying.

"Its fine," she says, her voice is like bay-water, the tide, "I like the things you like - so its fine."

"You do?"

"I like it most when you're happy. That's when I'm happiest, too, I think."

Blushing in the dark, under cover of night, like a true shinobi, Naruto glances up at the sky, visible like a landscape above them. In other places of the city, in other neighborhoods, the sky is more hidden, taken away by the roofs and walls, the towers and everything huddled so close together. But, here, in what has become colloquially known as The First Valley, the sky is visible and vast. There are houses here, amidst the apartment buildings. They have lawns, fences. There is a public pool, covered up by dark green tarp in the winter. Across the street, there is a school called Senju Hashirama Primary School of Konohagakure. Children - all children - are allowed to attend until secondary school, but it is expected that ninja kids will enlist early into the Leaf Ninja Academy.

Naruto stares at the darkened windows of the school. The brick walls and the playground full of brightly-colored, unlit plastic equipment. A yellow slide. A set of swings. Dark green monkey bars. Platforms and hidey-holes and little bridges. It reminds him of boot camps but more fun.

He smiles in a distant way then turns to Hinata as they keep walking.

"Okay - but, I don't know, maybe we should, like, take turns making plans?"

"But we like the same things?"

"We do? Everything?"

"Not everything. Most things."

"Most things…"

They stop to consider. Both at the same time, without having to tug the other's arm. They stop at the edge of the school grounds, under the pool of street-light, like they are in a noir film, investigating some occurrence, some mystery, about to kiss for the first time behind a glossy glass sheet held up by two grips positioned just slightly off camera. Their muscles straining with the weight of the glass sheet. Their fingers unable to find a solid grip. If they drop it, it shatters and the director - with his funny beret, his joules - will shout at them.

Hinata looks up at the sky.

"You like gardening, right?"

"Yeah."

"Yep!"

She is surprised at her own exuberance. The exclamation mark of her exclamation. Like a little girl in her father's art studio when he asks if she had a good day at school and would you like to be painted today. Yep, she would have responded, if that had been her father, a kinder man holding a paintbrush, always watercolor, and she would feel like a woman, sitting there so delightfully still upon the stool in the center of the room, the only place in the room without clutter, beneath a staging light, and she would sit in a little blue dress, her hands folded in the fabric, perfectly still for her wonderfully charismatic father that is slightly lazy and unafraid to show it, and he would then paint her upon the canvas, presenting her in a series of pastel blues, pinks and oranges, and she would see then how he sees her - as something more than possible, something only the abstract can ascertain. She would love herself, then.

Something opens up within her diaphragm as she realizes what it is she lacks.

"And I like pressing flowers into scrapbooks," she continues, feeling eroded, recovering, reaching for something good and true and new.

"Right."

"So, its perfect. You get to plant flowers and then I can press them!"

It occurs to her that women often, possibly, maybe, seemingly, according to unlit sources, spend more time crafting their relationships than men do. That is the idea we have. Is it true? It might be true. Probably it is true. Relationships are artworks, maybe. Sculptures made of liquid and gas. Statues that shift and move and change form over time and so we must keep carving off the things that hurt and patching on new, better things, and the work never ends, and we will always be a little mad at each-other, but that is okay too. Yes, it is okay to be a little mad.

Naruto raises an eyebrow at her. Right then, in that moment, he reminds her of greasers. Their shiny black hair. Their open and cartoonish contempt. Most importantly - their nonchalance. She laughs a little and the longer she laughs the more he begins to look like one.

"You okay?"

"Mhmhm," she says, taking his arm, pulling him forward, "Lets keep walking."

"The point of gardening, though, is to make something lasting, you know? Nature is about life," he says, spreading his free arm like a fan, as if gesturing to all the life all around them. The sidewalks and the worms, the alley-cats, the windows, the bricks, the ginkgo trees, the cold air.

"Sure, but you could let me have a few flowers. Just a few."

"Yeah."

It is acceptable. He will give her flowers. It is decided. As if engraved upon a plaque and presented to the Lord of the castle. This is how things are now.

"And we both like ramen."

"I thought you like red bean buns?"

"And ramen. Im better at eating than you."

How audacious, Kurama thinks, smiling without smiling, readjusting to find a better sleeping position.

"You're more polite, I guess, at eating."

"I can eat more than you, I mean."

"I doubt that. I have two stomachs! I'm eating for two!"

Hinata laughs - her laugh is like spring-water, "Me too…. One day."

"Ahaha. Hah."

He gulps like a cartoon character. She laughs - her laugh is like a windchime of silver.

"And what about training, we both like to train."

"Do we? I mean, we both like to improve. But I dont think either of us actually enjoys the act of training."

"But thats not the point. The stress and the pain of training is the point."

"Right."

"Do you like to read?"

She shakes her head then stops, considering, a finger to her lips, "Sometimes."

"Me too!"

"Sometimes?"

He nods, grinning. She laughs - her laugh is like a cavalcade of sparrows scattering from the tree-tops. She knows its untrue. He doesn't like to read. They pass an alleyway full of clotheslines. Frosted, stiffened jeans hang from the lines. Somebody must have forgotten to pull the clothes in. Why would anyone hang clothing outside during the winter? Naruto shakes his head as they pass the edge of the alley, down a street with a closed bookstore. Inside the windows, there are bookcases reaching the ceiling, like a labyrinth.

"Just pervy stuff though. I only read pervy stuff," he says. She stares at him. He laughs. She laughs - her laugh is like a sunbeam you can walk upon, upwards on a slant.

"I don't mind pervy stuff, I guess."

He stumbles forward as they walk. Clinging onto him, she keeps him steady. She laughs - her laugh is like his stumbling. He laughs a little too as they turn the corner. The next street opens up to them - a row of houses, lawns and chain-link fences. There are little pine trees scattered above the yards. There are bird-feeders full of snow and porches without any lights on. All the houses look like sleeping faces.

"You must have seen all sorts of things, with Jiraiya."

"Ehehe. Well," he says, rubbing the back of his head as though proud of his unruly childhood. Its funny - when you are young, you seek disaster. You climb upon rooftops and draw mean things into the bannisters. You steal asinine and unnecessary items from corner-stores and supermarkets. You get in your grandma's car and drive real fast and in the snowy streets you test how far you can make the car slide like a wagging tail around corners. You drift and slam on the brakes and laugh when you almost die. Then, as you get older, you expect to hate yourself a little for these shenanigans. You expect the adults were right and you will only feel regret for everything you did. Instead, you become a little proud. When you are older and have calmed down and somehow survived - you are afraid of your younger self, but you are also a little proud, too. Like these crimes you committed have become a badge - only because you survived, only because nothing truly bad happened. Maybe nobody even found out. Maybe your parents never learned these secrets. It feels good to tell people who didn't know you back then about your wild, youth days and then to say, "I'm just glad I made it out okay," or something like that. It's strange how the gleam, the wildfire appeal of it all, never really stopped even though now you'd never do it again and you'd never go back to that and you just want to write and read and watch shows and make a living. You want to be safe, now, yet, somehow, still, those strange teenage days still gleam like the Cheshire Cat, lurking in the unlit rooms of your personal history. You'd never do any of that again - and if you suddenly rewound and were a teenager again and faced with these options you certainly would not act that way a second time - instead you would study harder and graduate on time and read as much as possible and write as much as possible and you would do everything you can to be mature - but your youth was a torn thing, anyway, it was what it was and you are kind of proud of how frayed and unorganized it all was, too, you are kind of proud of yourself or this version of yourself, this fictional thing you once were, this image of a teenager you tried to be.

"How many?" she asks.

"Hmm? What's that?"

"How many women did you see, when you were out traveling with him?"

He blinks at her then looks upwards. The sky is dark and massive. There is someone smoking on the roof of the apartment building across the street. They are blowing rings. Someone else up there is laughing at them.

"Like - in hot springs or hotel rooms?"

She shrugs. He stares at her face, wanting to lie to her. He doesn't understand it, but he wants to lie and say that he lost his virginity already, that he is a renown lover, that he was introduced to the cardinal sins of the world at an age far too young - but no, that is not him. He is still a frightened boy when it comes to sex. He doesn't quite understand the image of it. The idea of it. Being naked with another person. Writhing around in the bed, tangling your limbs and - it must be suffocating under the blanket. All that body heat. All that sweat. The smells. And what if it doesn't work? He smiles inwardly and opens his mouth and closes it again.

"I dunno. Maybe a few," he says, glancing out at the empty, unlit cafes as they walk down the street. All those chairs stacked on top of tables, upside down on the tables like some kind of rebellion.

"A few?"

"Sometimes, I'd go into the room and see him there with girls - but, usually I could hear it from outside, you know? So I'd just leave and find something to do. But we were kinda open with eachother, too. I used to just walk in, if I needed something from my bag or the room, and he would laugh, and I would pretend to be annoyed at him, and I really was annoyed, but I'd also pretend to be annoyed, because really I just wanted to see the girls he had, yahknow?"

He laughs a little into the empty, quiet air. The winter snow falling all around them. The darkened line of cafes up the block. She smiles at his face, how boyish he seems, how honest. This is good, this is the best, to be with an honest man.

"Are you mad at me, now?"

"What?" she blinks, surprised, "No - no, of course not. I mean - I've seen men, too, so - there's nothing to be mad about."

"You've seen men?"

She nods, her expression shifting as if uncertain. His face looks like an infinity symbol.

"Well-"

"Like - in tea ceremonies?"

"What?"

"In tea ceremonies. Kiba told me about them."

She blinks. Down the block and across the street, there is a light on in a window above a shop. The curtains are drawn. But someones shadow is in the satin, sipping from a bottle.

"Tea ceremonies? What do you think tea ceremonies are?"

"Huh? Um," and he stops, thinking of all the terrible things Kiba said about horny old noblemen and dowries and choosing whether or not to drop the expensive tea-cups, "Courtship?"

She laughs and cant stop laughing. Her laugh is like the percussion section. She has to stop walking she laughs so hard. Naruto just stands there like a married man at a single's mixer. When she finishes laughing, like a faucet running out of water, she wipes her eyes and takes his arm and tugs him to keep going. They start walking again, passing the next empty cafe. Their sign still says open, but its dark in the windows and all the chairs are on top of the tables.

"Naruto."

"What?"

"Naruto. Tea ceremonies are just tea ceremonies."

He blinks at her. She smiles like a crooked wire.

"You drink tea at them."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

He decides to destroy Kiba at pool next time. Or maybe invite him to a sparring match and destroy him there. Or perhaps a race would be better. Any competition, really, that Naruto could hope to win. Maybe a race to find a specific person. Kiba tracks with scent, but Naruto simply uses Sage Energy, thus defeating Kiba at the one thing Kiba is really good at. Yes, that would be good.

"So - why do they call it a ceremony?"

"Hmmm. For the same reason why wealthy people are called eccentric but laborers are called crazy, I think."

"Ah."

"Yep."

Then they walk in the quiet dark. Everything is black and shining. They are on the surface of everything. The earth, the street, their bodies. It is good to walk on top of things. Caught by their boots to the earth.

Across the street, a light turns on. When they look, there are just darkened porches and windows. Music plays from somewhere nearby. Lilting, spinal music. Just a string instrument ambling down a path, almost stumbling through a chord. Then, it stops, too. They are in the quiet dark, walking together. The next street-lamp is down the block. It sits, a pond of orange light.

"So, when did you see all these guys, then? I told you about the women I've seen. But - Its fine if you dont want to talk about it,"

She laughs - her laugh is like a hiccup, "No, no. Nothing like that happened. Its just - my Byakugan can see clearly for ten kilometers, yahknow - ahem."

"Oh… Oh. Heh."

She blushes. He likes it when she blushes. It makes him feel powerful and loved. The first time anyone blushed when he spoke to them was Hinata herself, when they were just little kids, not even six yet, in the winter. He doesn't remember the first time he blushed, though. Blushing is a somewhat common occurrence in childhood, until we learn to grapple our feelings better. As we age, we become like shinobi - expressionless, deliberate, secure-seeming.

"So - you're a peeping tom?"

"I never peeped on purpose!"

Naruto laughs as they walk together. It is like applause. Like hundreds of clapping hands.

"Most of the time, I mean."

He keeps laughing - his laughter is like a starburst pulsing outwards with each new laugh.

"Not at first, at least."

He cannot stop laughing, now. Like he has been overcome by a disease of laughter. His ribs begin to hurt. Kurama grumbles to keep it down.

"I stopped when I realized it was bad!"

He cant stop laughing - the starburst begins to wobble and shake, as though nearing supernova.

"I just didn't know it was bad for - for awhile. Not until Kurenai-sensei caught me."

He laughs, wiping his tears - the supernova deflates, like a tidal wave crashing upon the rocky shores then receding back into itself. When it is over, he has to catch his breath, as though he finished a triathlon of laughter.

"Naruto?"

"I mean, that's fine. I knew it was bad and I still did it."

She laughs, at ease. Her laugh is like a tulip. He holds her arm a little tighter and they reach the end of the block. They stand in the orange pond of light, from the street-lamp. It smells like oil. Is this an oil lamp? Most are electric now, but perhaps some are still oil.

"Sometimes I did it even after though," she admits, like a conspiracy of the self, "Just once. Twice."

He watches her face. The way she doesn't close up when he looks at her too long. The way she remains open and honest. As the silence drags on, she fills the empty space with noise.

"Its really easy to peep, when you have the Byakugan! It mostly happens by accident. We have to have really strict rules at home about using it, actually. Long-standing traditions and everything. But little kids sometimes are too curious. Anyway - there are actually a couple perverted Hyuuga out there, too, I think. Hanabi just doesn't care. She's completely unabashed about it."

"Wait - has she seen my - uh?"

Hinata raises an eyebrow. Naruto blushes. She laughs. Her laugh is like a victorious cards player who won a pot of gold and five unsmoked cigars. He laughs a little, too. They are standing in a circle of warm, orange light, laughing together.

"Well - its whatever, I guess."

Pulling her in towards his warmth, Naruto leads the way out from the circle of light, through the crosswalk, and down the final, snowy decline, towards a bright red arch in the distance - the gate to the Uzumaki Corridor.

— — —

When her phone dings, she tears her gaze from the pool game to check the message - like slowly ripping off a band-aid. The screen lights up like a candle, reflecting in her eyes. She feels like a computer.

She blinks.

Kiba shoots, the balls clack, something lands. Cheering, high-fives.

She blinks, scrolling. The number is unknown, according to her phone. Her phone doesn't know anything. It's a work-issued phone. It's not allowed to know everything. There are classifications, as a Jonin, she must uphold. Not everybody can know everything. This particular phone number is off limits to most shinobi.

Unknown: I'm at your place…

"Fuck you," she says, clicking the screen black. Her reflection in the dark mirror. Just the contours, the shape of her face. She looks like a math problem, she thinks. Her lips screwed up in anger. Her eyes green and distant, half-closed. Find the X, she wants to tell him. Figure me out on your own.

A ball clacks. Someone shouts. More cheering. Then, the banter begins. Tenten and Kiba, arguing in the way they argue. Like an ongoing series of skits. Like they are on a stage at the Kabuki theater. When did they become so close? Sakura shakes her head, her tongue feels swollen. She bites it a little but nothing happens.

The phone rests heavy in her pocket. Like a lead stone she found washed up on a shore. Why would she keep ocean trash in her pocket? She would keep anything of his in her pocket, if he asked her. She hates herself a little. Her powerlessness when it comes to him. He is so uncareful, uncautious, about her. He could wield her in any direction in any way - he must know this. I should tell him, she decides. No - she shakes her head like a ragdoll. No - he can't know that.

"You shuck!"

"What, like oysters?"

Laughter. A cascade of laughter. Fireworks of laughter. They're all war heroes.

Her phone vibrates. It's erotic against her thigh. Like he's touching her through the phone. She inhales sharply - then, she wonders why she did that, why she acted so obviously as though she is on display. All the men in the audience - what audience? She takes it out and stares at the lit screen. She feels like she's in the water, just her eyes and forehead peeking over the surface. Half the message is displayed at the top of the screen, followed by a dot dot dot - the preview of the message.

Ino laughs like a bully. Sakura whips around, expecting to see her looking at the screen. No, she and Sai are further down, at the table, now, she's wrapped around him like he is a chain-link fence and she is a series of vines. Above them, a hanging lamp illuminates their romance in soft amber light. Someone laughs. It might have been Kiba. She looks around and can't see anybody else. They're playing pool at the table.

Sakura blinks.

The food pills are strong. Mixing with the whiskey and the beer. Something darkens in her gut. Ino has them, still? Her breath mints tin, curled inside Ino's fist. A fury erupts in Sakura's guts, something wicked and frenzied. Will she sleep tonight? She never wanted this. She never wanted this night. She wanted to go home and drink wine in the bath like a good person, like a professional. That's right. She never wanted the Utatane District. She never wanted to mix all these various intoxicants. What if she dies, tonight? What if she doesn't make it home? What if the District swallows her up like the Death God, like some cannibalistic giant of yore, gobbling her up like sheep? She squeezes her eyes shut and remembers she is a Jonin. Nobody can hurt her. The Yin Seal is her shield. Her fists could destroy this tiny pub. Everything around her is fragile and weak.

When she opens her eyes, the phone is still glowing at her. The yellow text preview at the top of the screen. The dot dot dot. The -

She swipes.

Someone laughs from somewhere in the bar. Someone in the crowd. Is anybody dancing anymore. She looks around. She looks back at the screen. She feels watched. Shinobi always feel watched. So do doctors.

Unknown: I'm at your place. Where are you?

Did he send the same message twice? No. No, he wouldn't. He would never do that. That's too - he is obsessive, though. Just like Naruto. And her. They're all obsessive. We're all obsessive, she thinks. Shinobi are obsessive. Our society gives way to obsession. The Konoha Eleven are obsessive. Child soldiers are obsessive. Jonin have to be obsessive. You can't become a Jonin unless you are obsessive.

Someone laughs. She looks around. She sees an empty glass on a small, circular table. It winks under the lamp-light. The wind blows against the windows, like a tantrum. Snow rising up in a flurry outside, in gusts. She can see the bouncer from here, shivering out there, smoking. What good is a bouncer? She wonders if he was ever a ninja. Probably - a Genin, maybe. This could be his mission for the night. Assigned to Sheep's. Maybe the bouncer is a Chunin. Maybe ANBU, assigned by the Sixth to keep an eye on her. The bastard. How dare he.

Naruto and Hinata are outside, she remembers. Last she saw, they were out there. She tried to ruin him, tonight. She called her out in front of him. Why doesn't she go to Banshee meetings? She shakes her head. How rude. No - but its true, too. And rude. _They're cute together_ , she admits, smiling wry and wooden. She thinks of her own coupling. He is probably licking his wounds somewhere. Maybe he snuck into her apartment, again. Or maybe he gave up and went to a shelter, this time. Bandaging himself. Meditating. Drinking hot jasmine tea. Something gouges in her heart, something painful and warm. She misses him, she realizes. She misses his body and the way that she understands him. She misses understanding someone. And she misses how comfortable his silences are. How they can sit in a room together for hours without talking. Sometimes, she likes being caught in his traps. How wicked he can be. She's under his thumb. She knows this. He knows this. He tries not to misuse this. Sometimes he does anyway, by accident, on purpose. Regardless, she misses it. She misses being unable to contemplate.

But, she's always improved whenever Sasuke is not around. After he left the first time, she became a prodigy doctor and was promoted to Chunin. After he left the second time, she was promoted to Jonin and founded a Clinic. When he's home, she flounders like a carp gasping for breath on the floor of a boat. He takes over her life like a parasite. He moves into her apartment without notice and doesn't help clean or anything. He moves into her thoughts, too, like a squatter. Her heart is a studio apartment, when he is around, and it only has room for him - and she loves it, too. She aches for it, for him, for his control, for his indecency, for his disregard. It's like genjutsu. It's like Tsukoyomi. But love isn't ninjutsu, is it? Love is just something else. There are people who claim love is a clinical thing. Made of chemical and enzymes and brain patterns. But, no - she knows better. Being in love is like being a Jinchuriki.

Her phone blinks. She looks. No new texts. An update? No. Why did that happen? She looks away, up at the ceiling. The slowly turning fans. Those are useless. They don't even move the air around. It's hot and stifling. All this body heat. The bar is crowded. People are drunk. She is drunk. She is drunk and high. Is she high? She has to think about it. She wasn't high. But she did take food pills at work, earlier, earlier in the day, when she got to work, yes, a half a pill, was it a half a pill?, was it crushed?, no, no, she wouldn't do that, would she?, no, but now she drank a beer, and she knows she did take a pill earlier. Yes, she took one at the bar, too. That's right. In front of Toro. Poor Toro. Toro is sadder than her, she thinks. He must be. She is a doctor. She is a doctor and knows better, but _oh_ it feels good. It feels good to feel good. To be in control. To be deliberate. To be ambitious. To work. It feels good to work. It feels perfect to work. To be busy. To be too busy. It's better than being free. Being busy is better than romance. It's supposed to be. No, it's not _supposed_ to be, but it is. It is.

Someone laughs. Kiba laughs. They're all drinking. He's asking for shots. Tenten's laughing, red in the face. Ino's laughing too. Sai is just standing there. They're all drinking. They're standing around the pool table, again, like Lancelot and the others. Like they are in a painting. She looks at the beer in her hand. It's almost gone, somehow. A mystery. Where does it go? It's a mystery. She sips.

Unknown: I'm at your place. Where are you?

She wants to swear. She swears. It feels good to swear. All the bad words feel good. They're so curt and tonal. They strike. It's a good, solid swear. How dare he, she thinks, sipping. How dare he just come and go like that. As if she is a motel. As if she has time to suddenly carter to his arrival and check out times. Fuck him. Fuck him. She hates him, sometimes. It's a recent thing, to hate him. She never hated him before. In school, she had a crush on him, a stupid, mad, child's crush. Then, they survived together. Team Seven. The Land of Waves. The Forest of Death. They were comrades. Even small mistakes could have resulted in everyone's death. But, they all survived. She loved him, then. No she didn't. When did it become real love? She doesn't know. She doesn't believe in real love, either. Real love is useless, a fairy tale thing. Passion matters. Domesticity matters. Responsibility matters. But he is the broken one. She doesn't need to impress him anymore. She - she doesn't know what she needs from him. His image fades but never ceases. Sometimes, it feels like he cannot exist simultaneously with everything else in her life. Its either him or everything. That is the choice she must make whenever she sees him. She hates him for that. It's a new feeling. Romantic hatred. It's not real hate. She likes to be hyperbolic, sometimes. It makes her feel in control. No, she's never hated him. She's feared him. She's worried for him. She's given up on him. But she has never hated him. It never came to that. She wants to wrest with her feelings. She wants to throw a net around him and hold him there. She wants to seal him into a small, glass bottle and keep him on a shelf above the fireplace. She doesn't have a fireplace. But she also wants him to leave forever, too, sometimes. She wants to kick him out, just once. She wants that power just one time. She could never tell Naruto that. But it's true. She could probably tell Sasuke that. She almost laughs. Yes, she realizes. She could tell Sasuke every single truth, but she could never tell Naruto every single truth. She laughs a little. She sips her beer. She became a doctor. She became a Jonin. When he comes back into her life, she cannot be anything but in love with him. It's not fair. And she doesn't hate him for this. She only hates herself for this. Yes. That's right. She sips her beer. Its not Sasuke's fault, anymore. He folds himself up as small as he can. He never wants to be obtrusive. He wants to be alone. Eventually, we have to just grow up. Eventually, we have to blame ourselves. Its fine to start by saying "its not my fault. I blame my parents. I blame the men in my life. I blame my friends," but, eventually, if we want to survive in a meaningful way, we have to say, " **I** will keep walking forward. Its my fault if I don't keep walking." Maybe one day we can shed the fault again - but not yet; we're not ready yet to be blameless. She sips her beer. He probably thinks that way too. She sips her beer.

— — —

Snow falls into the neighborhood, draping itself like white burial shrouds upon the tops of big blue dumpsters, the cobblestones of alleyways, the ledges of windows, roofs and overhangs, the gutters full of stench, and the barred windows of corner-stores and loan offices.

"Should I walk you to the Hyuuga Estate?"

She shakes her head.

The Uzumaki Corridor is different than her childhood. The Hyuuga Estate is vast, unending. Beautiful koi ponds. Nearly 30 different buildings, each designated for specific purposes: tea ceremony room, clan leaders meeting room, training grounds, dining hall, breakfast hall, Side Branch quarters, Main Branch quarters - the list goes on.

Naruto's childhood, however, is a cramped, smelly place full of small windows, shared balconies, and alleyways stuffed with black tangles of power-lines and circles of vagabonds crouching around burning trash cans. The sidewalks are full of shattered glass, necks and bases of bottles. There are condoms lying out in the open, smashed underfoot in the frost. Needles lay near the drain-pipes, cluttering the edges of the walkways. And, there are the oddities, too. A cereal box with the face torn off, pasted to a brick wall. An open can of purple paint sitting on the stoop of an apartment building, the paint frozen over like a popsicle. A tiny pink bicycle chained to a ginkgo tree, tires missing.

This is the Uzumaki Corridor, where refugees and immigrants are housed for the first year of their citizenship in Konoha while the arbitration period commences. When they are eventually granted full citizenship, they are free to move to other places. Most of them do.

Immigrants live in a state of upwards momentum. They strive. Ahead of them, above them, there floats a glowing blue orb of light that flickers just out of their each with each leap. But, they keep leaping, able to feel the heat of the light against their finger-tips, able to smell the blue-electric scent. For immigrants, there is only forward momentum - there _must_ only be forwards momentum - for if you stop, if you hesitate, if you glower, you may fall into the endless pit of poverty that waits just below your sandaled feet. You walk across this rickety bridge of bureaucracy, of citizenship exams, of cultural assimilation, of the INS, and if you misstep, you will fall.

The other denizens of the Corridor are the opposite of immigrants. The denizens are mostly responsible for the needles, the shattered glass, and the graffiti. They exist at the bottom - somehow - of the endless pit of poverty. They sit in that filth, looking upwards at the tiny white circle of the sky miles above them. And that is where they stay. They become accustomed to the culture of poverty and homelessness. When they turn 18, youth programs cease to accept them. They must find their own way. As time passes, they find that most of life is waiting in lines and taking exams to prove their competence, their pain, their poverty. Eventually, when nothing changes again and again, it becomes easier to just find whatever corner of comfort they can. Within joblessness, within homelessness, there is a certain infallibility. You know there is no way down. You know this is the bottommost ledge and that you never need to be afraid of heights ever again.

If the life of an immigrant is that of upwards momentum, then the life of the other denizens of the Corridor is that of stagnancy and acceptance.

Then, there is Naruto, who grew up here. This neighborhood did not used to be like this. It was Kamminaron who shuffled everyone here. In Naruto's childhood, this was a slum - yes - but it was only a slum by Konoha's standards. A military village of less than 30,000 people. What poverty can even exist in a place like that? Where everything is rationed. Nowadays, it is different. Since the war, almost a million refugees have already moved into Konoha. The Uzumaki corridor bloomed and collapsed. But it is still his home. He chooses to stay here, with his Genin wages, for the same reasons Hinata chooses to join him rather than retire to her Hyuuga villa up in northern Konoha.

"I like it here," she says. She says this like a little gift. As if she is giving him something, uplifting him in some way. She says this as they pass an alleyway in which a man in a black trench coat leans against the brick wall, hands stuffed in his pockets, an austere look on his face. When he sees who they are, his expression changes. It softens. He nods at them and lights a cigarette as they pass out of view past the edge of the wall.

"Really? You like it here?" he guffaws, almost spitting. She blinks at him, suddenly unsure, even a little hurt. He shakes his head, taking her into his arms, "You're right, me too. Its a good place, despite what people say. Everyone here is just - normal, you know? Normal people getting by."

"Do they treat you like the Hero of the Fourth War?"

He shakes his head, grinning, "They don't look at me with hateful eyes, either, though! I'm not just some Jinchuriki to them."

She smiles. Its what he really always wanted. As a child, he was hated and distrusted. So, he swung the other way, all the way into pariah-hood, wanting to be beloved and celebrated. Now, in his adulthood, he just wants to be normal, a person amongst people. The pendulum swings and comes to a stop somewhere in the middle.

"You'll be a good Hokage."

Laughing, self-satisfied, almost egotistical, Naruto wraps his arm around her shoulder and they walk as if in a two-legged bag race, passing a wall full of graffiti. There used to be a mural there, on the wall. It depicted people of the former Leaf Alliance - Konoha, Taki, Ame, and Kusa - holding hands in a line with the globe behind them. Now, it is a wall full of initials, tags, phalluses and caricatures. It explodes with color. Pinks and blues and greens and reds. Clouds of color, exclamations of color. It is a tie-dyed wall. And each new tag contains a new voice, a new dilemma, a new answer. This is a more accurate representation of the neighborhood, some would say.

Turning a corner onto his street. At the end of the block, they can see his oval-shaped porch looking out across the Corridor like a crow's nest. There is an owl sitting on the railing, overlooking the neighborhood like a watcher. Its eyes are yellow in the night, and when it sees them, it flies off, soundless and sudden. It dissapears past the edge of the opposite apartment building. The moon is not visible in the Corridor because the buildings, tenements and shops are so tall and close together, as if standing in a crowded room. In that way, this is their place of privacy. Toneri cannot see them here. He cannot invade their lives.

Always, even at night, there is both silence and noise. A shout several blocks down. A dog barking and squealing inside an apartment. A door slamming shut. A groan from the darkness. An unlit bicycle passing by. A cigarette being lit. A bout of laughter from down an alley. A street-lamp flickering, burning. Water running down gutters, into the sewers, gurgling like a digestive tract.

This is a place of scent, too. Trash in the alleys. Sulphur in the sconces. Frying oil, steam, shattered glass. Pot-smoke, sometimes, on the corners and through open windows. Fried tapas from the little restaurant down the block. Brats glistening with oil, sold from the food stand up the way.

There are five little restaurants here, opened by families from various Lands, where all the staff are siblings, parents and cousins. Two from the Land of Storms, one from the Land of Rice Paddies, one from the Land of Wind, and one from the Land of Silence, which is known for their steamed goat cloves. There is also a fortune-teller/incense-seller/tea-leaves shop owned by an immigrant from the Land of Tea. There is a weapons shop on Naruto's street, where they sell kunai, shuriken, tripwire and tantos; the shop is simply called "Ninja Goods." There is a barber who refuses not to use hair tonic on every customer. None of the corner-stores sell veggies nor fruits, instead only selling candy and pre-packaged dinner trays, along with tobacco, liquor and the other accouterments of life. There is a small law firm run by an immigrant from the Land of Bears who, when asked to show his diploma, simply points to his heart. There is a small shop of random wares owned by an old woman who has a rule: 'you may either purchase my goods or you may try and beat me in cards.' There are a couple bars that close at six, rumored to be fronts for the Foundation. There is a small park with a few chain swings and a slide, known as Ashina's Park, where budding gangbangers like to go and pretend they are not still children. And, there is an old temple from the Uzumaki Clan known as the Temple of Masques. In the basement, there is a wall of twenty-nine masks - the thirtieth is missing, leaving a clean white circle where it once hung. Across the street from the temple, there are the lockers where people without homes can keep their things. Having a locker is proof of dignity and excellence, a success.

This is Naruto's beloved neighborhood. He knows he cannot live here forever. He knows he will not raise his children here. But - for now - it is still his home. This is the Uzumaki Corridor. A place of aptitude, intelligence and work ethic. Survivalism is more difficult than a nine-to-five. Being a vagabond takes more willpower, more toughness, more intelligence, and more charisma.

As they reach the end of the block, the front steps of Naruto's apartment building rise up like a wooden audience. The light above the door - a green fire burning in a small tin pot, hanging by a bronze chain - welcomes them. There is a package in the bushes, soggy with melted snow. There is a mitten lying, smashed and wet, on the pavement.

"Just don't ever become a politician," she says, aware that her voice carries here. The Corridor is made of narrow, tall streets. The buildings are all stuffed together, with the thinnest of alleys canceling out the echoing voices of conversation. If you say something here, outside, most of the street can hear it. She wonders if they are silently applauding her, tonight.

"I promise."

"You'll be a good Hokage."

"I'll be a good Hokage, but not a politician."

"Good."

Pulling the keys from his pocket, Hinata makes sure not to step on the discarded mitten as she unlocks the door and twists the knob.

— — —

"To the Konoha Eleven!" Kiba shouts, lifting the shot glass like a small, amber candle. Sakura laughs; she can't stop laughing. Ino scoffs because it wasn't funny, but Sakura keeps laughing. She laughs because the Eleven doesn't include Sasuke.

"No, Kiba! To- to Sakura's old dead man!"

"What?"

"To the guy who died in room, in the room - I can't remember the number," Ino says, her sentence fragmenting into laughter. Sakura laughs harder. She is a whirlwind of laughter, an animal of laughter; when did everything becomes so funny? She laughs, remembering how her phone rang while the man died, earlier, and that genin nurse whose name somehow eludes her will never see her in respect again; this is funny, somehow; she laughs.

"To Naruto and Hinata," Tenten says, lifting her glass. Sakura keeps laughing because Naruto is supposed to be a snot-nosed little kid; she remembers his graffiti, his loud declarations, his stupid orange jumpsuit, and she can't stop laughing.

"To Hinata and Naruto," Ino interjects. Sakura's laughter evolves, becoming larger and gaining horns, like a final villain, like Madara; she laughs at that, too, remembering when she couldn't stab Obito's eye out, how she hesitated, in the climax of a war; why did she hesitate?; she doesn't remember; it was a long time ago, now; she doesn't need to remember; she just keeps laughing.

"What is it they call them, in the newspapers?"

"NaruHina!"

Sakura laughs like a machine. Like she is programmed for laughter. It is impossible to stop laughing. Her friends don't seem to notice, their shot glasses raised like swords, like a round table without the king and queen and Merlin. She laughs because they don't notice. And the stupid tabloids.

"To HiNaru," Ino says, sputtering laughing, her shot sloshing, spilling over the side. Sakura grabs hold of her friend's shoulder, they laugh upon each-other. Sakura remembers Inari, that little kid with the slingshot. The Land of Waves. How they all almost died. That was the scariest moment of her life, in that mist, trying to protect Tazuna with a single kunai, unable to see anything, everything wet with mist, and then she thought Sasuke died; she laughs; she can't stop laughing.

"Sai, here, this is how you do it," Tenten says, showing him how to take a shot. He smiles. Sakura laughs at his smile, remembering his beautiful art, his unfinished notebook, and Captain Yamato making a house in an instant. She laughs at all the houses he had to make, after the village was destroyed. Everyone lives in a Yamato house, now. She can't stop laughing.

"To the Konoha, fucking, Thirteen or Fourteen or whatever," Kiba shouts, raising his glass. Sakura raises her's, too, somehow, while laughing.

"Cheers!"

Throwing back her chin, she shoots. She doesn't know what they took. Tequila? Whiskey? It's funny, so she laughs. She laughs and everything goes dark.


	8. Chapter 8

Lights turn on. Music turns off.

Sakura blinks.

Something smells like burnt matches and liquor and sweat. Body odor and pot and cigarettes. Citrus spray and beer. Red wine. Dust hanging in the air. Sliced limes.

She laughs, looking around. Her laughter came from far away, as if the inside of herself; all that darkness and suburbia exists several landscapes away from Sheep's and from the District.

The bar is half-empty, all the customers (soon-to-be former customers) crowd near the doorway, revealing the full emptiness of the other half of the bar, the half that was - until moments ago - entertained by revelry, now stripped of boots and bodies, full of trash, like the beach after high tide. An imperfect relief. A quench. She is un-hungry.

The tables and chairs are misaligned, positioned like splatter-painting. Pool balls roll across the floorboards, like tricycle wheels ridden by silent ghost children. Empty glasses and chewed up black straws litter the benches, along with crumpled plastic bags that used to hold snacks. A bright yellow bag of Cheeze-nins. A bright blue plastic wrapper of a Kage Bar, holding now a eroded trail of lack crumbs. The rest of the bar trash is more intimate. A stick of lady's deodarent, the top missing, standing upright on a table's edge. An opened condom of the smallest size possible, smashed underfoot near the jukebox. On a stool, sat by itself, sits a dark purple purse. It looks like a fatty liver. The top is open, the cartoonishly large zipper hanging down like a tinny blink.

The bartender is scowling from behind the taps, leaning with a kind of aggression. Somehow, he is scowling at everyone at once. His scowl is the backdrop of this nightly exodus, a mural of a scowl, the scowl that you see just before you die. She tries to make eye contact with him, so as to share the joke of everything, but he avoids expertly, so expertly she is unsure if he has gone momentarily blind. She raises her hand to wave, but catches herself by parting her bangs. They fall back into place, unperturbed and steadfast within their gravity fall.

Conversational noise proliferates the empty spaces like an aroma. A crowd of teenagers/twenty-somethings/too-old-to-be-here-guys gather at the door, squeezing through like kidney-stones down the urinary tract.

Sakura laughs. Her laugh is like a wooden slap.

In the light, everyone looks like sea creatures walking on land for the first time. Fish and sharks wearing purple and black make-up. Piercings in strange places. Hair colored like oil slicks. They look like Pain; she laughs. But they are all kids, funneling out into the wintry streets. Slightly dazed, stunned at the suddenness of life. How it appears to a late teen like a rushing thing, a train run out of control, and you must jump on the platform and ride or die. You think you're made of speed and wit, audacity and language, but then you discover there is only the city at night, only alleyways and trash cans, only needles in the gutter, and the rest of life is the same way, a flat and vast landscape slowly closing in on you, the earth crumbling away at the ends of your sneakers. This thing, this promise of something, it flickers above your head like a glowing ball of light, and try as you do to grab hold and keep it, the light darts away, untouchable, while it drains the color from everything around you. Then, all you have left is either anger or audacity and the better trails you've already, luckily, accidentally, carved. Those traits and that anger turn into listlessness by the time you are 26. She doesn't know what happens after because her father never told her, and neither did any of her mentors.

These adolescent bar-goers don't know any of this yet. Life is still a giggling thing. They are on the cusp of freedom, having finally exited the pseudo-servitude of their upbringings, and dashed out from their warm houses, apartments, and duplexes, into the city. It is like a second childhood, becoming an adult and moving inwards. When you get there, new experiences open up to you. Some map inside of you fills in as you reach certain landmarks, as you drink in public for the first time, and you have sex for the first time, and you pay a bill for the first time, and you vote, and drive, and get jobs, and scam, and hustle, and go back to school, and learn how to survive. The checklist of real life fills in, but then you get lost and fumble when you realize that this is the best it gets. This. Right here. This is peak. This is prime. This mediocre thing we live is the best it gets. Nihilism can be a nice bean bag to snooze upon, but then you'll die fat and alone. With that knowledge, you must stay sober and standing. But you don't. It might be impossible for you?

 _It's okay to burn out_ , some little voice says in Sakura's brain. Like a tiny bird squeaking at her. She slaps it out of the air and watches them, the teenagers. They fumble in their pockets for lights, keys, phones. They step out into the cold winter air and shout into the sky. A girl forgets her purse and explains herself to the bouncer, her hands like saucers being held aloft, and he says, "I don't care; just go get it." His tone reminds her of Sasuke, that devil man.

Sakura looks out the windows, watching them. They are not much younger than her. Only by a few years. But those years are separated by the war. Twenty is the new sixty, and eighteen is the new ten. Those trapped in the middle are simply lost, fated. The war, memories of the war, is a thing she wears at all times, standing in the middle of an emptying bar at 2 in the morning, watching the congregation of drunk teenagers gathering outside. Cigarettes being lit. Kisses being exchanged. People lingering. They go as far as the sidewalk; then they stop to talk. They were only told to leave the bar. Nobody ever told them to go home. Nobody ever told them to get out from the cold winter night and find someplace safe and hospitable.

There is something wooden about all this. She shakes her head. She feels like an adult shaking her head.

How alive are the drunk people? If you forget an entire night, does it even count? If you are drunk every night after work, and you sleep six hours a night, that leaves less than half a day that you really experienced. But if your head was stuck inside of a phone, like an ostrich sticking its head underground to hide from their predators, thereby leaving their feathery asses exposed for patriarchal gunners to snap your photos to jack off to later, what is left? A few spare moments a day? A spit of cooking oil? A slice of rye bread? Breakfast? A bus ride, then another? What is left that you might remember in the moments prior to death? What is left worth recording in your life-book?

This is the noise of Sakura's mind. She won't be able to sleep tonight. She'll lie in her bed, twisting and turning, throwing the covers on and off, kicking her cat by accident. She'll get up and go to the bathroom and just sit there on the toilet, head in her hands until she realizes how cliche she looks. She'll open the fridge and unscrew the bulb so that her eyes won't adjust to the light next time. She'll take her blankets to her couch and sleep in front of the turned off television. In twenty years, the couch will bare the indent of her frame, and it will smell like sweat at all times. By then, she will have relegated herself to wrapping bed-sheets around the cushions and leaving bottles of water on top of the nicer of the two end-tables which, somehow, will have drifted from the actual end of the couch to somewhere between the couch and the Tv, at an angle exactly primed for her hand to reach the water (brand: Takifina) without even having to sit up or crane too far.

Yes. This is the noise of her thoughts. Fear and doldrums. An infinite thing.

And then it disappears because she is drunk. Yes. The temptation of liquor is not a thing of seduction or addiction or disposition. It is simply relief. Things must dim. Things must slow down and become still. Becoming drunk is like a tiny death; you lie down in the bottle-shaped coffin, with your hands crossed over your chest like Dracula's wife with the wild hairdo, and you close your eyes, and you pray, and you become tan.

She laughs. She scowls while laughing. Her laughter is like shattering glass. Her scowl is like the mosaic some college-aged visual arts student made of the shattered glass. When she opens her eyes, everything is bleary and binary and white. Dust hangs in the air, lit amber by the lamps. Ceiling fans slowly turn like sloths. All these fucking teenagers. Dressed in black and blue and pink. Wearing go-go boots. Wearing bandanas of sixty-thousand different shades of the same three colors. They crawl from the bar like cockroaches. Ushered into the snowy and unforgiving night. There is no safety net outside. No trust fund waiting in the snow-banks. Just the city and its darknesses. Drugs and drug paraphernalia. Sex. Condoms. Broken condoms and various (mostly venereal) diseases. A cigarette. A splif. An oil-less lighter. All these drunk teenagers. Sheep's. The Utatane District. The Kahyo Arch. The Chunin Exams Stadium's rubble. This is her favorite bar. She doesn't understand why. She keeps shaking her head back and forth.

The bouncer is inside. He's overweight, shaped like a rhombus. His face gleams with sweat. His beard is like a muff, like winter-gear. There is a kind of joy in his mouth. The way his lips part. The way his teeth shine like yellowing marble. And his eyes are beautiful and brown and thick and shaped like a certain type of nut.

She laughs. Why is the bouncer inside?

She sees he's laughing, too. The girl who forgot her purse flees into the street, middle fingers raised at the wind. The wind is like a tiger. It snarls and thrashes at the doors and the windows. The teenagers hats get blown off. Their hair goes flying. They laugh and scream and hug each-other for warmth and sex. The bouncer shakes his head, laughing. He laughs like a mountain-man. He thinks he's better than everyone else. He is. Right now, he certainly is. His sweaty face. His big hands. He takes off his sock cap, rolls it up, and stuffs it into his back pocket. He looks at Sakura. She sees a small lust in his eyes. He's ascertaining her, for a quick half-second. That moment of analysis. I wonder if she would have sex with me? I wonder if her tits are bigger without clothing on? She doesn't have to be Ino to know what thoughts cross his mind, by accident or on purpose either way it doesn't matter. But he jerks his thumb towards the door. He blinks and holds his eyes closed for a half-mote longer than usual. Its not worth it, he seems to decide. There is a kind of honor to him, maybe. Or maybe he is tired. Or engaged. Or sad. Or asexual.

Sakura waves, smiles.

She hopes he's asexual. It'd be nice to become friends with one. She'd tell him all her sex stories. She'd tell him all her fetishes. And her most vile thoughts. Because she knows he couldn't understand. Or thinks - that is more accurate. She thinks he wouldn't understand, or wouldn't have that ulterior motive, or wouldn't get a little bit hard. And maybe he would give in. Maybe he would use her, too, as a way to confirm for himself his own doubts. Maybe he would latch onto her caricature of him so that he could feel more like an asexual than he ever has before. He'd become a fighter jet. A flying ace. Destined for the skies and the stars and the sunlight, and she would finally feel okay texting her friends: "No. Im not going to the bar tonight. Because, turns out, its okay to be alone and like it."

But, the music isn't playing. She looks up. The rafters are empty and full of dust. The speakers look obsolete without music playing. Its like someone died. She is sure someone died. She knows a man who died today. At the hospital. He was a soldier like she was. And he coughed blood all over the clean white sheets. And he stopped talking. He stopped breathing on his own. They had him plugged up to machines. He was essentially a cyborg by then. You could adjust his heart-rate, his breath, his blood, via dials and buttons and levers. And then they pulled him out. The power bill was getting expensive. He had no loved ones who could claim his life and make that choice for him. So they pulled it and he found that relief and now the music stopped playing. It was going to stop playing whether he died or not. But the significance finds a little throne in the drunken meat of Sakura's mind. She is a hundred miles an hour. She is high.

Someone is sweeping. A woman with pigtails. She's wearing a tight black t-shirt with the Sheep's symbol pressing against her breasts, like an assertion. It feels forced. But her tips are good. There is a correlation between breast size and tips. You could write a graduate thesis on this and find obvious conclusions. Sometimes it tires her out, being attractive. People lick their lips when they look at her. Sometimes older women try and take her home, so as to teach her what real ecstasy feels like. The older men just get handsy. They let their Parkinson's-riddled hands go wild and free. In that way, the older men are easier to deal with than the older women. They're just a moment. A blip in time. But the women take forever. They come back over and over again, thinking that her dotty little head just hasn't realized her own lesbianism yet and that this process takes possibly months. But she knows herself. Or thinks she knows herself. She knows herself as well as anyone in their twenties possibly could. That is, she knows very little about anything, including herself, but she does know what she likes because she's liked it. They either think she doesn't notice or they don't care if she notices; maybe they want her to notice; maybe they get off when she notices. Sometimes she revels in it. Playing up to their wants by bending extra low when taking orders or sashaying with her hips when heading to the kitchen or the bar or letting her massive opal eyes gleam in exaggerated admiration. They tip better that way. But sometimes, every so often, it gets to her. She sweeps the floor and pays attention to the motion. She looks tired and old even though she is just twenty-three. It's almost three in the morning. She is sweeping. The teenagers haven't left yet. She won't get home until five. The bouncer will have to walk her home, so that she doesn't have to worry about attackers, thereby trusting him to not attack her. If only she'd graduated from the Ninja Academy like she was supposed to, then she wouldn't need to worry about rapists and thieves and ooglers as much? She shakes her head. She keeps sweeping. Ninja can be rapists and thieves and ooglers too.

The front door is clogged like an artery just before heart failure.

Sakura squeezes her eyes shut and opens them back up.

Somebody groans. Its a familiar groan. Kiba is there on the pool table, lying on his back, making a snow angel, the amber sconce lighting up his face like a theater. Sakura laughs and says his name. He turns his head to look at her, then past her. His red facial tattoos look violent. It must have hurt, when his mother carved his face. His eyes are swiveling and glimmerless. He looks like a pile of coats. He looks like a drunk war vet.

"Yoooooo," Sakura says, reaching for his hand. Someone grabs her arm. It's a man. He is bigger than her.

"Time to go," the bouncer says.

"My name is Harun-" she begins, pulling her bangs away from her forehead, to showcase her famous Yin Seal, but they fall back into place, and then she is outside.

She is outside in the snow.

Her boots crunch on the ice, but she isn't cold. She feels like an image of herself without any of the real stuff. A shape moving through the falling snow, stumbling past the bales of frosty hay, leftover from the harvest festival months ago. She stops at a brick wall, laden with ivy vines and graffiti. On top of the wall are two glasses sitting next to eachother. The first is a beer glass from the bar, with the brewery label stamped into the frosty curvature. The second is a rail drink, stubby and grumpy-looking, with the thin black straw sticking out from the gin and ice.

Sakura reaches then lets her hand fall away, back to her side like an empty sleeve. Wind blows, rattling the chain-link fence above the wall. A radiator hums behind spiky grass. She laughs from very far away, yet closer than from before. Her laugh this time has a vivid outline to it, thick and harsh and glowing. It has shape and movement. She doubles over, leaning against the wall, feeling the vines pressing against her back. It is a satisfying infraction. Her breath is like a plume of white smoke, like she is a coal mine or the vents you see on top of towers. Her eyes droop as she becomes restless, watching the crowd flow out from Sheep's. Cupping her mitten around her mouth, she calls out towards the door, "Kiba!"

The crowd of drunk teens flows past her. They are like a black river. She wants to leap into their waters and drown five times. It would be a folk tale.

The nightly diaspora. All these punkers being kicked out at once. The city is quiet at night and filled with the laughter and voices of these party people. They'll go onto greener pastures. Little nooks and hideaways throughout the city. Apartments, basements, abandoned buildings, and 24-hour diners. At night the city is quiet. Its so quiet that each sound becomes larger and more heavily outlined. This is the paradox of night. Everything is quiet and louder. She listens: someone laughing like a bastard hyena; a young girl crying into her palms; someone smashing a bottle on the sidewalk and it bursts into blue flame.

She opens her eyes and discovers she is walking uphill. Someone asks her for a cigarette. She shakes her head and becomes slightly smaller, tucking into herself like folded paper. Someone whistles at her in a jazzy crescendo. She becomes slightly bigger, walking more loosely and sloppily, her boots scraping against the concrete. Her phone buzzes like a duty. She keeps walking. Up the hill, towards the arch. The Kahyo Arch. The Kahyo Arch. She laughs in spite of the hatred she feels. She spits into the snow, and laughs knowing it will freeze. A knot of icy spit. Shaped like this animal clawing up her most middle pit. The Kahyo Arch. The Kahyo Arch. We are all Emiru, sometimes. She searches her pockets for her tin of food pills. Oh, yeah, she remembers. Ino has them. Ino is probably high. She swears. She swears again.

— — —

Ino has nothing better to do. She sets the tin of food pills down on the cedar breakfast table, next to a potted cactus. Its little purple leaves are just buds, pale and tight and pressurized, like knuckles pressing white into the skin.

"Bruh," she jokes, feeling something wither inside of her, like a small corruption, as she taps her forefinger against the little tin. The brand name 'KiriFresh' is stamped across the lid in explosive blue letters.

A newspaper sits next to Ino's forearm, folded in two and wrapped in transparent orange plastic, still slightly wet from the snow outside, as though it landed there when thrown by the kid on the bike. She doesn't look at the cover, avoiding the headline because she cannot think of a good reason to know what happened yesterday. Its been sitting there since she got home, slouching within its uselessness but for some reason she finds herself unable to toss it away into the bin. As if by holding onto this document, this notification of the news, she might lose proof that yesterday happened, that a day passed again, and some part of her might wonder if this is still the illusion, if waking up and the bandages falling away was all part of Pain's/Obito's/Madara's/Zetsu's/Kaguya's/Whosoever's plan.

Pressing her mouth into her palm, she bites at the callouses along the ridge of her fingers and stares out the window. The corner of Eighth and Eighth is solemn in the wintry weekend night. An unlit grill stands at the street-sign, its dome-like red top flipped open revealing the black charred grates. There is something almost sinister about that inside of the grill. Burnt remnants of animals displayed there in the falling snow. The harsh metal bars blackened by heat.

Beneath the grill sits a cardboard box full of snow and plastic bags and a few crushed cans of orange soda.

The duplexes across the street look like a row of frowning, sleeping faces. Double windows, curtains closed. Door-ish, snoring mouths. Chain-link fences separate their tiny yards like un-regal crowns. That's where the other people live; all the people who live here. This thought, this unnecessary, unpronounced realization whirs inside her head for a moment, turning on and off, like a night-light that doesn't know what time it is. Then it blinks off. It means nothing. There is nothing of substance there. Faces that look like houses. Fences that look like crowns. The people living inside all that nonsense. Its just nonsense. Knowing this, she smiles upwards, tossing her bangs away. She grins, her lips breaking open like a watermelon, her teeth emerging like weapons from inside the image of her mouth. Her bangs sly back downwards, floating over her eyes like threads of harvest sunlight.

This wasn't the promise. At some point during life, it seems we conjure up some idea of what this is supposed to be like. That we are supposed to become astronauts, or writers, or presidents and ambassadors, famous flautists and pianist prodigies, baseball players and successful activists. Or at the very least, it seems we think we deserve love, romance, children who respect us and parents who finally see us as grown. Instead, however, the timeline blurs. We keep stepping into the muck of reality. We discover things about our sexualities, or our neurosis, or our generational poverty, and life keeps stitching itself, the spools keep coming undone, and then we are suddenly old, feeling as though a promise was broken and not by us. Our friends become pill addicts. The hospitals we found lose funding and then we are in debt. Who was it that promised us happiness? Who was it that promised us success? We were supposed to wear red bandanas, taking to the streets, waving signs and flags and guns into the air, but instead we are inside these hovels, crouched on our couches, sweaty and hairy and horny and drunk. The television is on. She hears it. Someone else's television. It should be the neighbors, but she has no neighbor. She lives above the flower shop. Whose television is it? A television is on; she can hear the newcasters talking, she can hear the channels switching, all dim and vague and beyond several walls - or maybe this is just someone's thoughts, someone walking by outside, someone smoking a cigarette on their porch, someone remembering how it was earlier that afternoon when the power still worked.

This is what Ino fears most: becoming what she's seen the other shinobi become. Burning out. Burning into a leathery crisp, with just rusty shuriken and kunai to remember her by. As a girl, she thought she wasn't like the others. Ami and Kasumi and Fuki, that group of childhood friends, girls who acted like boys, and they would hang out in unsavory locations, under bridges, above bridges, in alleyways sometimes like trolls. The trollgirls. They were a small gang of themselves. Kasumi used to do push-ups in public, even though she was a girl. Her arms were thick like tree-stalks and strong as bamboo. Ami always carried a smirk around, and she let her purple hair grow out like an iron curtain.

They all excelled in school, in the Academy, with only Sasuke surpassing them. But then they never even made Chunin. Only Ino did. The others skidded to a stop not long after graduation. Cycled around the Genin Programs like laundry that can never get dry. D-Rank after D-Rank after D-Rank, while they heard stories about Ino and her adventures. Fuki married!

She married first, early, and got pregnant that same night. It was considered a small miracle, to her family, who thought she would either die a ninja or a lesbian spinster. The wedding was small and private, at the banks of the Naka River. Ino was the only Jonin there. Her family provided the flower arrangements. She drank enough champagne to feel like a ballet dancer, and she danced most of the night, during the reception, which was held in the VA. It was fun and terrifying. She went home and cried and fell asleep on the couch and woke up with the easiest hangover she's ever had. A shower cured it.

Her father was completely different from her even though their names are almost the same. He was put together well, as though created from parts that fit, exactly as the blueprints demanded. No missing pieces or jerry-rigged contraptions. No such thing as "it is what it is" and certainly no crying when childhood crushes went rogue. He was Yamanaka Inoichi, the Great Communicator, renown for not only his sensory skills but also for his diplomacy. A proper shinobi general who adhered to the Hokage and never failed.

Surely, he wanted a son. That was a small failure he never admitted. Just the one child. Ino. A solo act and a girl. He never knew how to talk to her. At the time of his death, his last words to his soldier, shinobi daughter were about love and romance. He called her his flower. He told her love finds a way. Her smirked forgivingly, with his eyes closed, as though even then, at the edge of doom, he was unable to say anything worthwhile to her. No such thing as fatherly advice. Just words spoken half-heartedly, meant to skate over the rough moment so they can keep working. This was why she left the Mind Reading Division, chasing Sakura into the Medical Corps. She knew she'd learn nothing from him. Only Aoba could learn from him. And Shimon. And Hijiri and the other men who gathered around him like awkward, smelly moths. Really, they were just nerds, and her father was the biggest, best nerd, but she was a girl and girls are only ever girls. Girls aren't allowed to be nerds or anything, really, except a girl or a woman. Sometimes, though, on special occasions, they can be "nerd girls" or "woman doctors" or "woman cops" or "kunoichi." She used to bully the nerds, anyway, in school. She was a bully.

Then she wept on the battlefield. This was the last time she cried, so far. Listening to her father die, imparting upon her no secrets of the Yamanaka Clan, no advice on what it means to be a shinobi, no death poem about her mother. Instead, that awkward distance between father and daughter stayed steadfast even in the face of death. She laughed about it, last week, finally, while Sai ate breakfast. He was eating a bowl of strawberries and cream. using a dainty little spoon that had a small dragon face engraved on the handle.

When she started laughing, (it began small, like a firecracker, before it crescendo'd into a full blown carnival) he stared at her with that way he stares: his eyes flat and impassive, non-judgmental, his lips surprisingly thick, pale and white, something ceramic about him, and he didn't fake smile at her and did not join in on her laughter. When she was done laughing, he quoted something from his book about social interaction and psychology. "I think that laughter was the hiding kind of laughter?" She shook her head, beaming at him, her bangs falling astray as the morning dewy sunlight licked her forehead. "Nope! It was just - I finally forgave everybody, I think? Or - I finally realized how to - the distance between soldier me and me me is massive, and I want to be everything at once. I want to cry and kill and interrogate and sell flowers every single day." He laughed, then, awkwardly, like a figurine of himself. "You want to kill?" She laughed, then, too, at herself. "No. No not really. I want to keep living, I guess. My life is fanning outwards, opening up, right now. Right now, Sai!" She slapped the table-top with her hand and grinned at him with all her teeth. He noticed they were clean and white and somehow perfectly aligned.

And they laughed together. And it was perfect. And her father was dead. And that was okay. That was finally okay.

But that was last week.

This is this week. This week is harder. This week is always harder.

— — —

Sakura passes under the Kahyo Arch, closing her eyes. The wind blows. She zips her parka up all the way. She's still drunk, but the textures of the world are lucid. Everything has a hard edge, a defined line. Past the line, the world is blurry and magnified. But the line is clear. The line is obvious. She keeps walking, but the concrete seems to slip out from under her like a conveyor belt. The faster she walks, the less distance she travels. Genjutsu, she thinks, raising her forefinger to dispel it - then she remembers: the food pills. The whiskey. She feels like a scarecrow standing in the blowing wind, the snow and quiet of the city. All the towers and tenements and power-lines. The snow makes everything silent.

"I remember when they raped her," someone says, a man's voice.

Sakura stops walking. The Kahyo Arch is taller than anything. In the night, she can't see it's color. Or there is no color at night. Color is made of light, and at night there is no light. Something darkens in the pit of her gut. She stares out at the voice.

Two men are leaning against the facade of the Arch, almost entwined. Both of them are wearing puffy black parkas that look stuffed with pillows. They look like mascots for cookie companies. One of them is picking at the corner of the plaque on the Arch. The inscription reads: Kahyo Emiru, Shinobi.

"Me too," one of the men says. He has a beard, like an opossum nesting on his chin and lips. His eyes are like gray flakes below the cliffside of his brow. "I knew her, you know. Little Emiru. She was a nice girl. A sweetie, really. She used to come by the wanton stand, in the summers, and during the Rinne Festival. God, she loved dad's wontons. She'd eat up our whole batch and then give us the victory sign."

He laughs once, like sand slipping down a glass tube. He grabs his beard, petting it, shaking his head, staring off at the snowy sidewalk.

Sakura leans against the wall, watching.

The other man starts to cry. Tears roll down his face, like hot water poured over ancient ceramic tea-cups. His head is bald and fuzzy and hatless like a peach.

"Hey hey," the bearded man whispers, petting the man's head.

"I should have been there. I should have done something." The younger man whimpers, pressing his face into the other man's collar. His voice become muffled. Sakura can't hear what he's saying anymore.

She holds her bag tight against her chest and looks upwards. The night sky is cut in half by the underside of the Arch.

She remembers it, too. When the news broke. Sakura was still in the Academy back then. She overheard it by accident one afternoon, when eavesdropping on her parents, but she was too young to understand all the words they used. How it all connected. So she asked Ino. And Ino understood. "Those Oaks ninja, the punished her." Ino said. And Sakura saw something adult in her friends' eyes at that moment. Like a secret only the grown ups could know. "For what?" She asked. Ino shrugged, and the thing in her eyes' vanished. "Cause she was Konoha, I guess."

It was not until later on that Sakura learned the real history. When she was sixteen, interning at the Hokage Office, she would peruse the archives. Tucked away in a file cabinet, she found documents about the incident. The manila folder was labeled: "Classified: The Kahyo Incident."

The Village of Hidden Oaks. A tiny shinobi center once allied with Kusagakure. They participated in the Chunin Exams just once. Only three of their Genin made it to the Forest of Death. Those three were seeking retribution. The Foundation had killed their leader just a week prior, using the Exams as an excuse to get within striking distance. They chose Emiru's team at random. Angry adolescent boys of the Hidden Oaks. They thought themselves to be freedom fighters, avenging their master against the imperialistic, dominating force of Konoha. Another rotation in the cycle of hatred and violence. They were not wrong, either, in their anger. Their anger was appropriate. Konoha has always been a massive warship, with long tangles of arms and hands that dip into every Land in the Continent. Despite what they wish to claim, Shinobi are just people. They make mistakes and act selfishly. Even Leaf ninja sometimes prey on the weak, during times of crisis and war. Nagato's family was killed without reason by Leaf Ninja. The Leader of Hidden Oaks was betrayed by Danzo.

First, they defeated Emiru's team in combat. Then, they strung the two boys up by their ankles and tied Emiru up on the forest floor. Then they raped her. She voiced dissent, of course, biting and kicking and shouting declarations of how she would protect her team and her Village. She thought a larger conspiracy was at play, that the Oaks planned to take the Hokage's head. They had no such desire at the time. This was a random act. Retribution. They raped her until she stopped arguing. They put her in a genjutsu to keep her docile and hid her away in a little cave in the Forest to make more use of her later. But she broke their genjutsu and bit her own tongue out. She bled to death, bound by her ankles and wrists, on the stony damp floor of a tiny little cave in the Forest of Death. It was an act of will. We tell stories about those who overcome, those who survive trials and tribulations and will themselves into heroic legacy. But there are also those of us who will ourselves to the relief of death. Who choose painlessness. That was Emiru. Her willpower was extraordinary. In the end, it saved her. She was not found until after the Exams ended.

Those Oaks-nin did not make it past the Forest. Her teammates had freed themselves from the trees they were hanging from and fled. They told the proctors who told the Hokage who ordered the perpetrators to be arrested, interrogated, and executed. Konoha covered up what they could. Years later, after the Great War, in the tribunals, this secret was also exposed. The news ate it up. Kamminaron renamed this Arch after her so as to appease the growing kunoichi rights movement that was against his purchasing of ancestral clan lands. So it goes. That is the history of it. Sakura now stands there inside of that history. Under the Arch. The snow falling all around her like a sallow orchestra. Watching two men console one another in the shade of a monument dedicated to Emiru.

She feels sick. Her gut writhes like a basket of snakes. She isn't drunk anymore. She wants to be drunk again. Maybe she is still drunk. She sways. She blinks; she closes her eyes. She hears one of them call out to her, one of the men over there. His voice is like an out-of-tune violin. Faraway. Spindly. Like spider-fingers. She doesn't hear what he's saying. Her body feels like a motif of itself. Or a scarecrow. She needs a scarecrow, she thinks. To scare off the men. Hinata has a scarecrow to do just that. Sakura feels sick. Something like envy. No - it cannot possibly be. She has never been envious of Hinata. Maybe once. Twice. Envy is a male weapon. One of the many violences of patriarchy. A subversion meant to tear women apart. And men, too. We all get torn apart by envy. We get tribalized. But only unity can defeat It. The rapists and the murderers and those who -

Sakura shakes her head. She opens her eyes. The men are staring at her. They are so close together. Like one person, almost, as if sharing a coat. Are they? Oh, they are. They're sharing a coat.

Sakura laughs. It is like dry grass is caught in her throat.

"Are you okay?" The bearded one's eyes shine like little lighthouses. He is the big spoon. She almost thinks the following: "He is the man in the relationship." She hates herself for almost thinking it. She shoves it down to the bottom of her mind.

"I'm always okay." She smiles with her eyes closed, cocking her head slightly to the right. That is the correct pose. Men like this pose. They always forgive your sloppiness so long as you act cute. If you can incite that little 'ba-thump,' then you can get away with being a normal human.

They give her sad little smiles.

The shorter, bald one gives a thumbs up and wipes his eyes. His tears will freeze into the snow. Sakura gives him a thumbs up back. Her mitten is pink. She feels like Rock Lee. A genius of thumbs up. And she keeps trudging up the hill. They're watching her leave, like she is a strange animal or maybe they want to help her. She can feel them watching. There is a physicality to their gazes. A force. As though she is being propelled upwards.

Past the top of the hill, the city flattens our before her like a rusty iron fan. It is a gazeless thing, the city. A hundred thousand windows of light. Strangers swimming from room to room. Noise and steam and street-lights.

In the distance, beyond the initial architecture, the tenements and government buildings, office buildings and other buildings, buildings in the various shades of gray and brown brick, buildings made of concrete and glass and more specific fibers, and buildings painted by muralists and spray artists, buildings taped off for construction, buildings already sagging like rumpled old top hats, and buildings spiraling upwards with a fierce kind of joy - past all that she sees the hospital. Every window lit up, it glows like a mellow sconce. Like a palm gently propping up the city. Like the leg of an easel, the snatch of a framed photograph. In her stomach, her diaphragm, and her solar-plexus, she feels a city made of pride, buildings erected with a stalwart determination, banners flying through the sky like flocks of migratory geese come home for the summer. Yes, she remembers. Because of her, there doesn't need to be anymore Emirus. Maybe. If she can just stick with it, if she can be as good and enduring as the generations of women that preceded her, then maybe there won't need to be anymore Emirus.

— — —

As her comrades, her friends, burn up like matches at the base of the wick, she feels it happening to herself, too. Drinking every weekend and during the week. First just Fridays, after work. Then Saturdays, too, because it's Saturday. Then even on Sunday, during the day, because she isn't so religious, and there is something good and mellow about drinking wine in the early afternoon. This is how that started, but it began to happen on Wednesdays after that, to help with the work-week, only for Thursday to join in on the festivities because it's like a Friday except not yet Friday, followed by Monday because we damn well need a drink after the first day of work. Only Tuesday remains on its bastion, like some kind of Alamo funded by the AA.

Part of this is the lifestyle. The job requirements and the requirements of her ambition. She is almost histories greatest therapist, now, even though she wasn't a therapist at all until a few months ago. She is this close to saving all the war kids. Everyday another lunch or dinner or brunch with someone integral to the Clinic. Investors (landowners, corporate execs, etc). Union leaders (the nurses, the janitors, the construction workers). Doctors (famous and not famous, clinical and surgical). The up-and-comers (culture changers, activists, thesis writers and speech givers). The bureaucrats (The Hokage's minions he despises for the very reasons they are needed). Lastly, always, the politicians (the heads of committees, the heads of other nations, mayors of towns, and, obviously, the Lords and their retainers). Each of these little meetings requires a certain amount of alcohol. Cocktails at dinner, to smooth out the wrinkles. Bloody Mary's at brunch, to lubricate the proceedings. Sometimes wine, if the dinners go late. Red if she needs to be a bit seductive. White if this is formal. Rose if the suit opposite her is foreign and fancy and/or a fellow woman.

Each of these meetings also requires an outfit. This is her weak-point because, generally, she prefers to wear only purple, showing off her abs and thighs, making sure everyone can see the ostentatious slopes of her hips and breasts. It makes her feel powerful, her skin, her outlines. A rebellion of flesh, a goading. People claim its her father's fault, but she spits on their shoes for it: there is no such thing as fault, and if there were, it should be her's because its her choice. Most of these meetings, however, require a more docile approach, subtler, sexier in an austere way, and certainly less "slutty." (Although, she opines, they never call her beau, who also shows off his abs, a slut…)

According to the top minds of the medical field, a hussie can't know squat about brain-mapping, but according to the top donors in their midst, a masculine woman doesn't need the dough. This is multiplied by each person she must meet with. Fashion seems to be more important than actual therapy, so far. Sometimes, it feels as though she spends more time picking out clothes than she does training or preparing for missions. But it is necessary. If the doctor she must meet with next Monday thinks she's too flirtatious, he might not be willing to listen to what she has to say about genjutsu therapy and the mechanics of the Shintensin and how those might be applied in a clinical setting. However, when she meets with a potential investor, she must wear a pencil skirt, a white or cream-colored blouse with the top button undone, and a necklace that gleams, drawing the eye towards her clavicles. All that in order for the investor to be invested. This all requires research, study, and survey. She calls up their secretaries, asking about her targets, their preferences, their styles of humor, their favorite television shows. Being the first therapist in the shinobi continent is a lot like being an investigative journalist. She has files on all the investors and doctors and politicians and journalists, tabulated and labelled in a cabinet in the bedroom/study.

It is tiresome. She feels like Shikamaru, lately, all strategy and no urgency.

But she has ambition. Ambition is the only way to survive.

One by one, her friends are dropping, like apples that turned ripe too fast. Hinata was the first to stop trying. After everything that happened on the moon, with Toneri and abandoning her comrades to infiltrate his castle, thereby putting the entire world in danger, she was placed on probation for several weeks, during which time she finally took charge of her life and quit being a field combatant, instead taking missions of diplomatic natures. Kiba, lately, is collapsing in on himself like a dying star. Becoming wilder, angrier, prone to sudden outbursts and sudden bouts of solemnity. He either holes himself up in his unfurnished apartment, drinking beer from cans, watching television, or he goes out for several nights straight, collapsing on pool tables or park benches. The only respite he gets, the only time he is sober, is when he goes out on missions. Usually, these missions involve finding people: missing civilians, rogue ninjas, runaway wives. Then there is Sakura, Ino's closest friend, who is bursting apart at the seams. Everyday, things are a little more strained and the bloom of food pill addiction becomes more and more engorged. Her friends are dying, Ino is sure. The shinobi life eventually gets to everybody, either you die on the battlefield, like her father and Neji, or you burn out into a shadow of yourself, like the White Fang and the Fifth Hokage. All ninja in history can be categorized this way. This is the exchange. This is the promise that was kept.

Sitting back in the stool-chair, she sighs, exhaling, running her fingers through her bangs, pulling her hair slick back like a lioness greaser. She eyes the tin of food pills, sitting on the table as if without weight. Speed disguised as breath mints. There's probably a metaphor somewhere about old boyfriends. Her stomach twists. She stands up and sits back down, crossing her legs, staring hard at the little peephole in the front door. A tiny circle of crusty white light.

Her one-bedroom apartment with Sai is furnished in a western, Iwa style.

There is a small piano near the front hall that nobody ever plays. It functions like an end-table, something to lay coats and envelopes and keys on top of. Its harp-ish surface holds all kinds of clippings from news articles and the Sunday funnies, receipts and ticket stubs, coupons and half-finished mail-orders, a thousand different business cards. There is an ashtray full of pennies and nickels, toothpicks and mystery keys, bobby pins and buttons. A coffee mug stands upright, almost at attention, clean and straw-berry pink with a suction-top; Sakura left it here seven months ago and forgets to bring it back home every time she comes over. The drawer of the piano is always open, showcasing the rows of keys, the black ones gleaming under the lamp-light, the white ones just sitting there, bigger, clumsier. Underneath the piano, obscuring the foot-pedals, are stacks of zines. Local and underground. Zines about erotic graffiti. Zines about grunge poets. Zines with titles like "i dont want to finally up" and "ZemSlashR." Sai brings these home. He gets them from newstands and pin-boards in cafes, music venues, bars and museums. Artists hand them out on the street. Sometimes they fall from the sky. Each one holds somebodies hopes and dreams, their truths and untruths, and showcases an automatic vulnerability, a willingness to crumble or brighten, and some desire to stoke or douse a cultural flame. He keeps the Zines neat and orderly, tied by rubber bands and strings.

The edge of the piano is just a little bit longer than the edge of the kitchen's wall, resulting in stubbed toes and sudden curses. They haven't gotten around to softening the corner yet. The kitchen is narrow like an alleyway or a crevice, opening up into a small window-space where the little cedar table is. Pots and pans hang from hooks above the stoves. Metal spatulas and stirring spoons sit in the sink, settled there like small fallen trees, burned with residue from eggs and onions and noodles and soy. There is a small, worn welcome mat in the middle of the kitchen tiles. The light above the oven is switched on, illuminating the dust particles drifting beneath it like currents in the water.

The living room is an art studio, crowded by easels, unstretched canvases, rolls of parchment, inkpots, cans of brushes and pens and scalpels, bordered by uncurtained windows looking out at a field opposite the shop where neighborhood kids play dodgeball and futbol and make snowmen. When Sai is painting, sometimes those kids will spy on him from the field, sitting in the grass or on their bikes, watching his arm and hand flailing at the canvas. They can't ever see what he's painting, from that angle, but there is something admirable about a local master at work. The performance of a craft, viewed with a kind of voyeurism. His paintings go on sale and never feature any color. He says he doesn't like colorful art, that black and white and hints of gray requires more mastery, more presence, by the artist, and that the audience pays more attention this way to the brushstrokes, the timing, the textures and shapes.

The floor of the living room is hardwood, but you cannot see it because of all the newspapers and plastic sheets which are covered in black ink and paints, as if when he works he is standing upon and accidentally creating a new art-piece. Sometimes, when Sai is not home, Ino likes to stand inside of his studio, with hands on her hips and stare at the ceiling. The ceiling is white and vast and empty and unpainted. It is not art. But staring at this not-art from the middle of his studio means she has become the art, or that she is inside the universe of Sai's art, looking up at what life would be like if he stopped working. Whiteness. Blankness. So much space you become crowded by space. In that way, she mirrors the neighborhood kids who watch him paint. They look from within that other-ness, and she looks at the otherness she is not a part of.

This is the movement of life, she thinks. Looking outwards at something else, while you stand inside the swirl and storm of papers. She is a small business owner. A florist. A Jonin. A therapist. A lobbyist. A clan head. Living with a painter, an ANBU. Their life is made of scraps of paper. Business transactions. Receipts. Bank notices. Checking accounts. Scrolls. Canvas. Letters to editors. Letters to secretaries. Letters to leaders. Funding requests. Requisition forms. All this accounting. Each piece of paper, stacked on a surface or fluttering in the ether air conditioning, has a label and a usage, a purpose written down. And that is the stuff of life. This is something good about being a telepath, the amorpheous nature of thoughts. There is not text or bar-code to a thought. It simply floats. Its made of fog and shifting colors.

Ino shakes her head, the weight of this life pressing down on her. Lifting her chin up into the air, she laughs at the ceiling. Its vast and white and peppered, as though dripping down on them slowly, invading their art.

" _Do you think you'll get the prints done on time?"_

She thinks this into the void of the hallway, listening as his mind reacts, perking up like a hound who smelled something interesting. She feels him skating across the floor in his bare feet, appearing on the other side of the kitchen, as though at the end of a small tunnel. His paleness is like a pitcher of cool water. Unnaturally skinny, his ribs press against his white skin like claws. His hair is blacker than ink, growing longer on the sides and in his bangs. He's shirtless, with a toothbrush hanging from his mouth. He knows she likes that, his empty hands, the nonchalance of the brush. She likes it when he chews toothpicks at the table and when he bites the wooden end of his brushes when he stops painting to stare into the work, seeing things she cannot ascertain even in his mind. This is sexy to her. The unknown parts of him becoming known. The eunuch way he socializes, slowly taking on the mechanics of what she likes and admires. When they met, he was like an unpainted canvas. As they've come together, he absorbs her ink, becoming her art.

"Yes. They'll be done one time. Tomorrow morning, I think." His voice is like fine china. She shifts her weight on the chair, aiming for him like a beacon, tapping her finger on the tin of food pills. Grabbing it in her fist, she tosses it to him, and he throws it into the trash bin they keep under the kitchen sink.


End file.
